Mandatory reading for an accreditation visit...and then what I want to read...

I lost my momentum.  The accreditation self-study for the College of Micronesia arrived in early February and when I wasn't working, I was reading about this faraway place that I would be visiting.  There were also followup reports, tables, and charts to analyze and then a whole series of evidence I needed to explore.  After weeks of reading and preparing, I was off to Honolulu for a night and then, before I knew it I was sailing over the waters of the South Pacific into another land, so far away...Pohnpei, Micronesia.

It was a long plane ride, and in the spirit of delaying gratification (as in The Road less Traveled), I reread all my highlights in the self-study before I cracked open my book and started pleasure reading.  Reading for pleasure...that is what I really want to do this year...but I found that this Micronesian experience stalled me. 

Along the way, I finished Bradbury's Dandelion wine.  An unforgettable read of a young Bradbury growing up in 1928 in Iowa.  A mesmerizing story of a coming of summer, and a coming of age.  Maturation. Early wisdom.  Bradbury pulled me in to his story and I found myself marking passage after passage that I never wanted to forget.  For example:

• … From the age of twenty-four to thirty-six hardly a day passed when I didn’t stroll myself across a recollection of my grandparents’ northern Illinois grass, hoping to come across some old half-burnt firecracker, a rusted toy, or a fragment of letter written to myself in some young year hoping to contact the older person I became to remind him of his past, his life, his people, his joys, and his drenching sorrows. (Introduction to Dandelion Wine)
• So I turned myself into a boy running to bring a dipper of clear rainwater out of that barrel by the side of the house. And, of course, the more water you dip out the more flows in. The flow has never ceased. Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with, not work with, no, play with. Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.
  
  And I loved this quote, probably most of all, describing the process of growing up...
• the need of boys, traveling, always traveling to be men. (16)
  
  And for anyone who remembers sitting on the porch on a warm summer's eve...
• What they talked of all evening long, no one remembered next day. It wasn't important to anyone what the adults talked about; it was only important that the sounds came and went over the delicate ferns that bordered the porch on three sides; it was only important that the darkness filled the town like black water being poured over the houses, and that the cigars glowed and that the conversations went on, and on. The female gossip moved out, disturbing the first mosquitoes so they danced in frenzies on the air. The male voices invaded the old house timbers; if you closed your eyes and put your head down against the floor boards you could hear the men's voices rumbling like a distant, political earthquake, constant, unceasing, rising or falling a pitch.
  
  Douglas sprawled back on the dry porch planks, completely contented and reassured by these voices, which would speak on through eternity, flow in a stream of murmurings over his body, over his closed eyelids, into his drowsy ears, for all time. The rocking chairs sounded like crickets, the crickets sounded like rocking chairs, and the moss-covered rain barrel by the dining room window produced another generation of mosquitoes to provide a topic of conversation through endless summers ahead.
  
  Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the dimness, the eating foil-wrapped, chill Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people. For at some time or other during the evening, everyone visited here; the neighbors down the way, the people across the street; Miss Fern and Miss Roberta humming by in their electric runabout, giving Tom or Douglas a ride around the block and then coming up to sit down and fan away the fever in the cheeks; or Mr. Jonas, the junkman, having left his horse and wagon hidden in the alley, and ripe to bursting with words, would come up the steps looking as fresh as if his talk had never been said before, and somehow it never had. And last of all, the children, who had been off squinting their way through a last hide-and-seek or kick-the-can, panting, glowing, would sickle quietly back like boomerangs along the soundless lawn, to sink beneath the talking talking talking of the porch voices which would weigh and gentle them down....
  
  Oh, the luxury of lying in the fern night and the grass night and the night of susurrant, slumbrous voices weaving the dark together. The grownups had forgotten he was there, so still, quiet Douglas lay, noting the plans they were making for his and their own futures. And the voices chanted, drifted, in moon clouds of cigarette smoke while the moths, like late apple blossoms come alive, tapped faintly about the far street lights, and the voices moved on into the coming years...

You get the idea...it is a wonderful book.  If you haven't read it before, read it now.  If you read it in childhood or in your youth, or as an adult, read it again...and again.