Don't Ever Be a Rocket Man

While Fahrenheit 451 is probably Bradbury’s best-known work, my favorite volume is The Illustrated Man, a collection of eighteen classic short stories.   Bradbury deals with a range of subjects from time travel in “The Fox and the Forest” to work and family life in “The Rocket Man” to the projected results of an alien invasion in “The Concrete Mixer”, from racism in “The Other Foot” to Christianity in “The Man” and “The Fire Balloons”. 

A common description of Bradbury’s prose is that it is lyrical, and that is true enough.  It is also deceptively light and simple.  Rarely does he slap the reader’s face with a point or a mood or an emotion.  Here is an excerpt from “The Rocket Man”:  

“Let’s hear it,” he said at last.

And I know that now we would talk, as we always talked, for three hours straight.  All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim. 

Dad nodded each time I spoke and smiled and slapped my chest lightly in approval.  We talked.  We did not talk of rockets or space, but we talked of Mexico, where we had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we had caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred butterflies sucked into our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson wings, twitching, beautiful and sad.  We talked of such things instead of the things I wanted to talk about.  And he listened to me.  That was the thing he did, as if he was trying to fill himself up with all the sound he could hear.  He listened to the wind and the falling ocean and my voice, always with rapt attention, a concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and kept only the sounds.  He shut his eyes to listen.  I would see him listening to the lawn mower as he cut the grass by hand instead of using the remote-control device, and I would see him smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him behind the mower in a green fount. 

“Doug,” he said about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, “I want you to promise me something.”

“What?”

“Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.”

That is the way it is done.  A father and son are together on the beach, talking, remembering, and a specific memory is drawn up and presented so lividly.  There is the bittersweet beauty of the butterflies and death, evoking and foreshadowing.  Anyone who ever had a parent whose job took them away, or any parent who ever had such an occupation can identify.  Son, don't ever be a pilot, a sailor, a commercial fisherman, a truck driver.  Don't let your work become your life and try to hold onto your family in bits and bites.  Don't become consumed by the road or the sea, the rails or even the keyboard.  It will end before you expect it, and it will all be gone, like the butterflies crossing the road. glimpsed only as it is lost, dying and fading away.  It may not end in physical death and separation.  Nevertheless, the lost youth of the parent, the lost childhood will vanish away.  Quality is good, but it only makes the missed time more poignant.