Dandelion Wine

“The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the woodland. Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing his wrists, the real heart pounding his chest. The million pores on his body opened. I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!”

While out in a field, collecting strawberries with his father and brother, Douglas suddenly feels his senses open up to the world around him, and he experiences a grand epiphany in which ordinary things become intense, dramatic, and meaningful. It’s the first day of summer, and the warm freedom that Douglas always feels with the season somehow releases him to sense the fullness of life.

“The boys bent, smiling. They picked the golden flowers. The flowers that flooded the world, dripped off lawns onto brick streets, tapped softly at crystal cellar windows and agitated themselves so that on all sides lay the dazzle and glitter of molten sun. ‘Every year,’ said Grandfather. ‘They run amuck; I let them. Pride of lions in the yard. Stare, and they burn a hole in your retina. A common flower, a weed that no one sees, yes. But for us, a noble thing, the dandelion.’”

Dandelions, which are a nuisance to most homeowners, have a quiet beauty all their own. Pressed into wine, they distill the dreamy heat of summer. Grandpa appreciates the unheralded wonders of ordinary life; he taught this important value to his son, who passes it on to Douglas, and now the boy goes forth loving everyday things and getting more out of a single day than most people might in a month.

“Well, he felt sorry for boys who lived in California where they wore tennis shoes all year and never knew what it was to get winter off your feet, peel off the iron leather shoes all full of snow and rain and run barefoot for a day and then lace on the first new tennis shoes of the season, which was better than barefoot. The magic was always in the new pair of shoes.”

Warm-weather residents simply cannot understand the joy of slipping into the light, fleet shoes of summer after enduring the endless months of a snowbound winter. For Douglas, tennis shoes are as much a part of the season as people chatting on porches, fireflies, and warm breezes through the window at night.

“He realized he and his mother were alone. Her hand trembled. He felt the tremble...Why? But she was bigger, stronger, more intelligent than himself, wasn’t she? Did she, too, feel that intangible menace, that groping out of darkness, that crouching malignancy down below? Was there, then, no strength in growing up? No solace in being an adult? No sanctuary in life? No fleshly citadel strong enough to withstand the scrabbling assault of midnights? Doubts flushed him.”

For the first time, young Tom confronts his fears of nighttime and death without the confidence that his mother is there to protect him. If she, too, is afraid—in this case, of the Lonely One, a roving killer who might be hiding in the ravine where Douglas is playing—then Tom cannot rely on her presence to keep all bad things at bay. In this moment, the boy experiences one of the frightening revelations of growing up.

“Bill, when you’re my age, you’ll find out it’s the little savors and little things that count more than big ones. A walk on a spring morning is better than an eighty-mile ride in a hopped-up car, you know why? Because it’s full of flavors, full of a lot of things growing. You’ve time to seek and find.”

Grandpa understands the importance of little things and of taking the time to notice them. Young people need to prove themselves, but, to him, they sacrifice important parts of life in their hurry to get things done. His listener, journalist Bill Forrester, admires Grandpa and takes the proffered words of wisdom seriously. The scene represents a profound exchange between young and old, a time-honored process perhaps more respected in the 1920s than in the high-tech, rushed era 100 years later.

“Leo, do you ask what makes your heart beat all night? No! Next will you ask, What’s marriage? Who knows, Leo? Don’t ask. A man who thinks like that, how it runs, how things work, falls off the trapeze in the circus, chokes wondering how the muscles work in the throat. Eat, sleep, breathe, Leo.”

Leo’s wife Lena reminds him that, despite his brilliance, he can overthink things and make a mess of them. Thinking is highly useful, but using it to calculate every decision interferes with the human mind’s ability to move naturally and informally through the day. Most wise actions happen intuitively, not intellectually.

“No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you’re nine, you think you’ve always been nine years old and will always be. When you’re thirty, it seems you’ve always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You’re in the present, you’re trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.”

Helen Bentley recalls a conversation she had with her late husband when he criticized her obsessive habit of keeping old ticket stubs and other trinkets from her younger days. She still feels youthful in spirit, but her body betrays her old age to others, especially the neighbor children, who refuse to believe that she ever was a little girl. Helen must embrace who she is now rather than clinging to a past version of herself that she will never be able to recover.

“Beware, Charlie, old men only lie in wait for people to ask them to talk. Then they rattle on like a rusty elevator wheezing up a shaft.”

Ancient Colonel Freeleigh regales Charlie, Douglas, and John with stories of his past adventures. The boys love these exciting tales; the colonel’s vivid descriptions are like a time machine that transports them to an otherwise unknowable past. By listening, the children pay homage to their elders and willingly absorb lessons about life in their country that might otherwise be lost.

“War’s never a winning thing, Charlie. You just lose all the time, and the one who loses last asks for terms. All I remember is a lot of losing and sadness and nothing good but the end of it. The end of it, Charles, that was a winning all to itself, having nothing to do with guns. But I don’t suppose that’s the kind of victory you boys mean for me to talk on.”

Colonel Freeleigh’s stories include lessons for the boys on the horrors that await soldiers on the battlefield. Soon enough, wars will test these boys as well, and not merely in their courage. Listening to the colonel might temper their eagerness for glorious carnage, or at least help them survive.

“John was running, and this was terrible. Because if you ran, time ran. You yelled and screamed and raced and rolled and tumbled and all of a sudden the sun was gone and the whistle was blowing and you were on your long way home to supper. When you weren’t looking, the sun got around behind you! The only way to keep things slow was to watch everything and do nothing! You could stretch a day to three days, sure, just by watching!”

Douglas’s close friend John Huff must move away with his family this very night, and the boys’ companionship will soon end. Douglas wants to stretch their remaining moments out as long as possible in order to deny The Unstoppable Passage of Time. He senses that, as with other things in life, hurrying through activities causes people to miss out on the wonders of each moment. Suddenly those perfect times are over, and only memory can bring them back.

“And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below. You will fall in darkness.”

Colonel Freeleigh dreams of death—his own, perhaps—and awakens, frightened, still fighting the forces that impel him toward oblivion. Let other people plummet like a rain of apples. Instead, he soldiers on, shaking a fist at his fate.

“‘That’s how you hurt yourself in the first place, isn’t it? Getting excited, talking too much. Those boys up here jumping around—’ ‘They sat quietly and listened,’ said the colonel. ‘And I told them things they’d never heard. The buffalo, I told them, the bison. It was worth it. I don’t care. I was in a pure fever and I was alive. It doesn’t matter if being so alive kills a man; it’s better to have the quick fever every time.’”

The colonel protests the restrictions enforced by his nurse. Her orders are to keep him from any over-exertion, lest he have a heart attack. Although she means well, she does not realize that telling his stories to the boys is one of the few things that makes life worth living for the old man. In an attempt to preserve the colonel’s health, the nurse unwittingly snuffs out the last embers of his once-vibrant life.

“‘When you’re seventeen you know everything. When you’re twenty-seven if you still know everything you’re still seventeen.’ ‘You seem to have learned quite a lot over the years.’ ‘It is the privilege of old people to seem to know everything. But it’s an act and a mask, like every other act and mask. Between ourselves, we old ones wink at each other and smile, saying, How do you like my mask, my act, my certainty? Isn’t life a play? Don’t I play it well?’”

Helen Loomis, 95, chats with journalist Bill Forrester, who admits that he hardly yet knows anything: an attitude she admires in a young man. Helen possesses the sardonic wisdom of great age; she’s well aware of the march of time and how the years trample down people’s illusions of maintaining control. To admit, at last, that one does not “have it all figured out” results in a paradoxical freedom to speak authentically without expecting any applause.

“[Helen asked] ‘Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life?’ ‘See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff, but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.’”

Helen asks Bill about his ambitions. The young reporter’s goals are highly romantic and evoke a sense of eagerness to make great discoveries and experience intense emotions. A yearning to experience life in all its variety befits a journalist. It’s also part of the book’s argument that life should be lived intensely, rather than quietly endured like a dull school assignment.

“He thought of her quiet, shyly smiling face. It was the face of spring, it was the face of summer, it was the warmness of clover breath. Pomegranate glowed in her lips, and the noon sky in her eyes. To touch her face was that always new experience of opening your window one December morning, early, and putting out your hand to the first white cool powdering of snow that had come, silently, with no announcement, in the night. And all of this, this breath-warmness and plum-tenderness was held forever in one miracle of photographic chemistry which no clock winds could blow upon to change one hour or one second; this fine first cool white snow would never melt, but live a thousand summers. That was the photograph; that was the way he knew her.”

Bill first becomes aware of Helen’s existence through the photograph of her as a young woman, the one sometimes used in the newspaper. Entranced by her youthful visage, he unknowingly sought her out with romance in mind before realizing her true age. When he meets her in person years later, discovering that she is ancient but still sharp and spirited and wonderful, the two fall in love, their spirits a perfect match. The author’s vivid description—with its use of a silent snowfall to represent beauty and love—employs an unexpected metaphor that reaches into the ineffable mystery of love and pulls from it a delicate sense of wonder and understanding.

“She had stuffed turkeys, chickens, squabs, gentlemen, and boys. She had washed ceilings, walls, invalids, and children. She had laid linoleum, repaired bicycles, wound clocks, stoked furnaces, swabbed iodine on ten thousand grievous wounds. Her hands had flown all around about and down, gentling this, holding that, throwing baseballs, swinging bright croquet mallets, seeding black earth, or fixing covers over dumplings, ragouts, and children wildly strewn by slumber. She had pulled down shades, pinched out candles, turned switches, and—grown old. Looking back on thirty billions of things started, carried, finished and done, it all summed up, totaled out; the last decimal was placed, the final zero swung slowly into line. Now, chalk in hand, she stood back from life a silent hour before reaching for the eraser.”

Douglas’s Great-Grandma looks over her life, finds it satisfying, and goes upstairs to die. Hers was the kind of life expected of women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, yet somehow, she managed to accomplish much more. In her own quiet way, she was what, in men, would have been called a Renaissance genius—someone who was excellent at everything she touched, from the expected domestic labor to mechanics, sports, consulting, and healthcare. Her abilities aren’t all that unique; they represent the same tasks accomplished by millions of women of her generation and beyond, who, when locked out of careers permitted only to men, applied their many strengths wherever they could. These efforts often go underappreciated by men, many of whom couldn’t have achieved as much.

“Look around come April, and say, ‘Who’d like to fix the roof?’ And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas. Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above. Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weathervane some spring sunrise.”

On her deathbed, Great-Grandma tells Douglas that if he appreciates the world around him, she’ll still be there with him in spirit. She understands well what Douglas is learning, that summer: that life is to be lived fully and enjoyed for all its wonders, which transcend the yearnings and sorrows of daily life and make meaningful all our struggles.

“I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade. That’s my answer to anyone asks big questions!”

To Douglas, Great-Grandma explains that humans aren’t solitary but exist within all the people to whom they’re related. The sweet moments of life that seem too short will still continue on in a person’s descendants. Life is therefore endless; it keeps regenerating itself, if for no other reason than to keep looking at the world in awe.

“SO IF TROLLEYS AND RUNABOUTS AND FRIENDS AND NEAR FRIENDS CAN GO AWAY FOR A WHILE OR GO AWAY FOREVER, OR RUST, OR FALL APART OR DIE, AND IF PEOPLE CAN BE MURDERED, AND IF SOMEONE LIKE GREAT-GRANDMA, WHO WAS GOING TO LIVE FOREVER, CAN DIE…IF ALL OF THIS IS TRUE…THEN…I, DOUGLAS SPAULDING, SOME DAY…MUST….”

In bold block letters, Douglas tries to sum up the hard facts he has learned during his 1928 summer. He’s unable to reach a conclusion, perhaps because there is no way to sum up, much less solve, the tragedies and sorrows of life. The only answer he can find is that he, too, must one day die.

“Hey, nonny no!

Men are fools that wish to die!

Is’t not fine to dance and sing

When the bells of death do ring?

Is’t not fine to swim in wine,

And turn upon the toe,

And sing Hey, nonny no!

When the winds blow and the seas flow?

Hey, nonny no!”

A coin drops into the arcade machine and the Tarot Witch fiddles with her cards and produces a message for Douglas—an old English rhyme that reminds him that, death or no death, life is to be enjoyed to the fullest. The card also predicts for the boy a long and lively existence. It is worthwhile to note that long after Dandelion Wine was published, Bradbury himself enjoyed a long, full life and died at the age of 92.

“The sun did not rise, it overflowed.”

During the swelter of a summer morning, with its dusty breezes and attic-hot homes, the sun climbs over the town like a molten tide. Bradbury describes it with words that are both metaphorical and deeply moody. He chronicles the relentlessness of summer heat, which torments Douglas, who wakes with a high fever. Bradbury brings an almost-supernatural quality to the scene to evoke the book’s ongoing emphasis on the intensity of ordinary life.

“RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have tromped the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH!”

Standing in Grandma‘s kitchen, Douglas rediscovers his love for life after recovering from his illness. The losses and defeats of recent weeks fade away, and, once again, he can fully appreciate his world and those he loves. Grandma, a big favorite, shows her own love of life in the culinary wonders she prepares for the boarders at her home. Douglas now understands the value of expressing one’s aliveness in action.

“‘No one knows what Grandma cooks,’ said Grandfather […] ‘until we sit at table. There’s always mystery, always suspense.’ ‘Well, I always like to know what I’m going to eat,’ cried Aunt Rose, and laughed. The chandelier prisms in the dining room rang with pain.”

A lot of meaning is packed into this passage. Grandma is an excellent chef who indulges her creativity for the benefit of her boarders; Grandpa honors his wife’s genius and is alert to anything that might disturb it; Aunt Rose is a bit loud, more tolerated than loved, and busy signaling her intent to interfere with house traditions. The author ties off the scene with one of his trademark metaphors that’s both colorful and comical. Even the house itself seems to suffer from Rose’s overbearing presence.