Farenheit 451

I somehow escaped all my years of school without every having to read Farenhheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  Joel came home from school the other day with the book, and as soon as he had finished reading it, I started reading it and I couldn't stop.

I was amazed at the description of our modern society, with everyone more concerned with what's buzzing in their earbuds than the sounds and conversations of real life.  The characters knew and cared more about their "TV families" than they cared or knew about the people they actually lived with.  The whole book was just awesome, and eerie in the way it described our society today.

And then I got to the end.  It was still awesome, but my mind totally switched from analyzing the societal parallels to something much more personal.

The book perfectly described my feelings of grief about the loss of my dad this past summer.  I really think I am doing OK with my dad being gone (if there is such a thing--it is still horrible), but every now and then some memory will pop up, or I'll see something that reminds me of him and I cry. This part of the book made me cry.  Sometimes things that remind me of him make me laugh.  Like today when I happened to have an extra stylus in my computer bag at a school, and a teacher next door desperately needed one, I laughed.  And I think my dad was smiling from heaven.  My dad kept everyone he knew well-stocked with styluses.

Anyway, here are the beautiful words I read last night that made me think of my dad, and how lost I feel sometimes without him here.  He made his mark on the world through the things he did, and I am so glad to have many things I can look at to make me think of my dad.

"When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I've never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on."

"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."

"Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by

God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He

touched me. As I said earlier, he was a sculptor.