ABSTRACT
Memory is history. It is both our history and our received wisdom. And this thought takes me back to a slender little book by Ray Bradbury. I think more than any other book, Dandelion Wine captures growing up, shows us the process of recollecting and recomposing. It’s about a boy’s summer and its ending at a time when the world was simpler, or seemed so. The boy had helped his grandfather harvest dandelions to be made into wine, which they stored away in the cellar against the winter’s chill. The very words dandelion wine become “summer on the tongue,” and some of his “new knowledge,” “some of this special vintage day would be sealed away for opening” on a winter day, when some of the miracle, by then forgotten, would be in need of renewal. “Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass…” (9, 10).
