“He Was Very Tall” (Gabrielle
Ever now and then I look at my books and notice all the books I own that I have not read. Recently I had this strange thought- maybe I could start reading those books. And since I collect Ray Bradbury I thought I should start there.
I love reading Bradbury. When I grow up and become a writer I want to write like a combination of him, P. G. Wodehouse and Douglas Adams. Ray Bradbury can make words dance better than any other author I’ve read. There are places in his books when nothing is really happening and I am enthralled by his description of it. His words read like poetry in prose. He makes the words dance a ballet and I just love sitting in the front row and watching. Douglas Adams comes close to Ray Bradbury’s skill with words, but since he makes words dance a polka the affect is rather different.
The book I’m reading right now is Something Wicked This Way Comes. The two main characters in the book are two thirteen-year-old boys, Will and Jim, who always run together. The first secondary character is one of the boys’s father. He married late to a woman younger than himself, had his only son when he as forty and now he feels old and tired all the time. Before he got married he was a wanderer, going from town to town collecting knowledge, looking for wisdom. He stopped in this town because he met the woman who is now his wife and he didn’t want to leave her. But now he is very distant from his family and he spends his nights at the library where he works as janitor, still looking for wisdom and trying to be good when he knows he is a sinner. He almost never talks to his son and while they love each other they don’t really know each other.
Then evil comes to town and Will and Jim get caught up in its plans. Will’s father is the last person we expect them to look to for help, but he somehow knows they need him and rises to the occasion. He reveals himself to be a perceptive, eloquent man who carries a great portion of wisdom that he has never shown anybody other than the books he surrounds himself with. There is one part in particular that I thought was especially beautiful. The boys are hidden under a grill in the floor and Mr. Halloway, Will’s father, is standing right over them talking to the evil man who is looking for the boys. Mr. Halloway manages to lie to the man who leaves in a fury. Will looks up and realizes that his father is very tall. He’d never noticed before then.
Last night the kids and I watched Small Soldiers, By no means an excellent movie, but the toys walk and talk and fight and that’s always fun. One set of parents are presented as being a little over-bearing (the other set are complete buffoons), but towards the end in the big battle the father fights for his family right in front of his son. I never noticed this part when I was younger, but this time through I noticed and appreciated the look on the son’s face when he realizes his father is strong.
These moments resonate with me. I know what it feels like to be protected by a father who loves me. There was this one time Elizabeth and I were building a snow fort in the parking lot behind our house. Four or five neighborhood boys came along and took our fort from us so we moved across the parking lot and started another fort. When we were about half-way done they declared war on us and stood over us pelting us with snowballs. Elizabeth had just gotten stitches out of her head (another fun story) and got really scared that her cut had broken open. Thankfully her fear looked like anger so she stood up and told the boys that she might be bleeding now and it was all their fault. And then we went home.
My father was mad. He walked back with us and listened to the boys lie to his his face. He told them off anyway. To their credit, after they lied one of the boys said he was sorry, he hadn’t known she had just gotten stitches out of her head. It didn’t count for much because he had just stood there and listed to his friends lie to my father, but it counts for a little. Anyway, I felt so good standing there next to my daddy watching him defend me from the neighborhood bullies. As I look back on it I remember him being very tall.