Being Ray Bradbury's Granddaughter | 02.21.19

I got an early education in, well, just about everything from my grandfather. Goes with the territory, I suppose, when your grandfather is Ray Bradbury. 

Many of his lessons I’m only now fully appreciating in my mid-thirties. If the first few decades are any indication, something tells me I’m in for a lifetime of uncovering more of his lessons tucked away in the oddest, most unexpected of places.

My grandfather showed me the world at an early age—both the one that exists in reality and the one that lives in our imaginations. The latter may seem the safer of the two for a towheaded tot, but leave it to Ray Bradbury to twist even the magical road to sweet surprises of a board game known as CandyLand into a reminder nothing is saccharine nor sacred.

Children around the world have laughed and smiled their way through Candy Cane Forest and Gum Drop Mountain in pursuit of King Kandy for decades. They never played CandyLand with my grandfather.

One infamous game took a dark turn when I realized I was facing off against the real-life version of Lord Licorice, an evil villain who firmly disavows the common practice of letting little kids win. We never played CandyLand together again.

Other board games resulted in varying degrees of success over the years, but only when we played with other family members who could act as referees. Relationships don’t tend to blossom under constant chaperoning. 

I see now my grandfather was only trying to find a way to connect with me, to find something we could share in common despite our difference in ages.

Ray Bradbury is nothing if not persistent, and no one ever accused him of being short on ideas, so he tried a new approach to forming a relationship with me a few years later. And this one stuck.

By second grade, my grandfather had turned me into a full-blown philatelist.

Find me a cooler hobby for a young girl than stamp collecting.

I secretly loved that my grandfather, despite all of his professional successes, still made time for hobbies. (My younger brother would eventually get to share in his coin collecting hobby. That’s right—I got stamps while he got to collect actual money.)

My grandfather had many hobbies. That’s not to say he took his work anything but seriously. Awards and accolades lined the walls of his dark, wood-paneled home office.

Most of my adult life I even credited his work ethic for my own. That’s what you’re supposed to do: Take something you pride in yourself and credit someone—the more successful, the better—in your life who exhibits it. 

Only recently did I start to see he gave me something far greater than the value of hard work. 

My grandfather never lost his sense of wonder which enabled me to keep mine far longer than considered cool. I played with dolls and believed in Santa Claus years later than most my age.

Only a year ago did I realize, or notice, I’d lost mine somewhere along the way. I’ve spent the past year fighting like hell to get it back, in part guided by letters my grandfather wrote to me as a child. 

I didn’t recall receiving a formal invitation to share in his lifelong hobby of stamp collecting. I mostly remembered his absolute love of all things Disney—yes, the traditional characters but FantasyLand and EPCOT, both hubs of innovation and international culture, also stand out among the memories we made at the Magic Kingdom.

That is, until I unearthed our early correspondences during a forced excavation of my childhood, also known as that rite of passage when your mother no longer cares to store your entire youth in boxes in her attic (therapy bills are in the mail, mom!).

In more ways than I could’ve imagined, these letters helped me piece together a part of me from a time my memories are more macro than micro. Re-reading them, it’s as if each contains clues to a puzzle.

The earliest letter I have hinting at my future in philately is one he sent me when I was 7 years old.

“I’m sending you, along with this letter, a booklet of 10 new postage stamps that have just been issued,” he wrote in a letter postmarked Dec. 4, 1991. “They are called commemoratives (that’s a very big word) because they commemorate a special event. In this case they commemorate space exploration. I love stamps and I collect them. Perhaps you will eventually become interested in stamps, too.”

This man did not mess around with subtle suggestions and hints. I’ve learned by “eventually,” he meant soon. Very soon.

“Dear Granddaughter, if we’re to be correspondents then it is time we get started,” he wrote on April 5, 1992. “I am enclosing an envelope containing some stamps to add to your collection.”

I went from licker of stamps to full-blown philatelist in less than four months.

“American stamps often tell a story and can also help you in learning about people who have been important in American history and history itself,” he wrote in one of his early letters.

Funny, as that’s exactly what his letters do for me now. Once only mere vessels for the stamps affixed to the envelopes they traveled in, they now tell the story of us, of me and my grandfather.

On holiday visits and for a couple weeks a summer, he and I spent hours and hours soaking stamps off envelopes, studying them, learning their histories, imagining their journeys and seeing the beauty in their flaws and imperfections—something I’d begin to do with myself decades later.

The rest of the year, we wrote letters to one another. Most I’ve kept in their original envelopes—in tact save for the upper-right-hand corner that’s been ripped off every last one to save the stamps.

In some of his letters he downright predicted the future.

“The information superhighway is one you are already learning to travel,” he wrote in a letter dated Oct. 15, 1994. “It will be very important in your future.”

Touché, Grandpa. Especially funny considering the one and only telegram I’ve ever received came from him on my first day of kindergarten.

Travel—the literal kind—played a big role in our relationship growing up. My grandparents traveled the world together and always made sure to share as much of it as possible with my younger brother and me. 

My grandfather documented their trips and narrated every last detail on hours-long video recordings.

Every step.

Every sight.

Every bite.

I never looked forward to these viewing parties of documentaries I had no interest in as a kid. What I did look forward to was the endless stream of postcards that traveled far and wide—rarely ever beating my grandparents nome—to my suburban Atlanta mailbox. The more passport stamps they collected, the more international postage stamps I collected.

Very quickly, not that I realized it back then, this stamp collection business became my window seat to the world. As I collected stamps from Myanmar to Malaysia and China to Chile, I could appreciate the old adage that a postage stamp is a mighty small thing, but it sticks to one thing until it gets there. 

On a family trip to Scotland one summer, between the deaths of The Notorious B.I.G. and Princess Diana, my younger brother and I complained about it taking forever to get to whichever castle or cathedral we sought out that day. The more we complained, the more frustrated our grandfather grew. 

Finally, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he shouted (he’d say he “annunciated”), “We. Will. Be. There, When. We. Get. There!”

We laughed so hard at the silliness of his statement for the rest of the afternoon, trip and for years to come.

I laughed about it again just this week while strolling the streets of Amsterdam when it hit me. Decades later I finally understood exactly what he had meant that day. As I wandered without so much as a semblance of where I was—lost in the traditional sense, yet exactly where I was supposed to be.

My grandfather used to cut out newspaper articles and mail them to me along with his letters. 

Most of the articles centered on stamps, but sometimes he threw in clips about personal finance, politics or professional development. You know, typical reading for a grade-schooler.

“I saw this item on the obituary page of our newspaper,” he wrote to me, age 9, on Jan. 2, 1995. “Do you know what an obituary is? Look it up.”

Following that advice proved useful years later as I began a career in journalism—the same cannot be said for the incessant multiplication-table drills he ran me through over the phone growing up.

As an entertainment editor at USA TODAY, obituaries—preparing them in advance, pulling photos from the archives for them, publishing them online when the time came—made up much of the job.

Yet nothing could’ve prepared me for that early June morning when Ray Bradbury’s obituary crossed the wires while I was on duty. Tears ran down my cheeks as I went through the motions to post the Associated Press story online.

It’s unnerving to see your grandfather’s name in that context—even if you know it’s not his obituary. 

I called my grandfather when I got off work that afternoon. I needed to hear his voice. I didn’t mention the famous writer’s death and reason for my sudden interest in his wellbeing.

Last summer we celebrated my grandfather’s 90th birthday. I struggled with finding the right words for my toast to him leading up to his party.

I considered using a favorite quote from the other Ray Bradbury—writer and household name the world over—to toast mine—coal miner and household name in select pockets of Appalachian coal country.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” the former wrote in Fahrenheit 451. “See the world.”

What one Ray Bradbury said with words, another said with stamps. 

Maybe we never lose our sense of wonder, we simply stop stuffing our eyes with it. It’s easy to forget we can see the world from anywhere—even tiny towns in coal country—as long as you keep your eyes open and pay attention.

At my grandfather’s birthday party, I thanked him in front of the one hundred guests who came from far and wide—just like all those stamp-adorning postcards I so treasured growing up. Each from a different place, each with a different story to tell.

I thanked him for the insatiable curiosity, incurable wanderlust and unquenchable thirst for knowledge he instilled in me through our shared hobby.

While I couldn’t convince the U.S. Postal Service to dedicate a future stamp series to telling my grandfather’s story, I did convince the Smithsonian Library to let me adopt a book from the National Postal Museum’s collection in his honor. 

The Smithsonian Libraries’ Adopt-a-book program provides essential funding to support the conservation and digitization of the chosen title, in perpetuity.

I chose to adopt the book The Golden Age of the Newspaper in his honor. The perfect synchronicity.

The day after his party he told me how touched he was by my speech as well as by this gift. 

“I never realized the impact stamp collecting had on you,” he said. “I didn’t how much it meant to you.”

I’d never told him, because I hadn’t yet realized it myself. 

I don’t know when exactly, but I stopped paying attention. I stopped stuffing my eyes with wonder.

It took my grandfather turning 90, me quitting a job and career I once loved, a hurricane and a multi-continent search for me to find what I didn’t know I was looking for: my sense of wonder.

“I’m enclosing something I saved especially for your birthday,” he wrote to me on my 35th birthday, adorably marking the message about hummingbirds on the card protector included with the words “Please read.” Lessons come in all shapes, sizes and [paper] sources, I suppose.

“‘The Art of Magic,’” he continued, “was a 2018 stamp issue. Included among the stamps was the traditional ‘rabbit out of the hat.’ Then the USPS came up with the souvenir sheet enclosed. You cannot buy it at the P.O. Simply tip the hat [of the hologram version of the stamp] and watch the rabbit. Thought you might like it.”

I love it, Grandpa. Thanks for the reminder that wonder is all around us, all we have to do is see it and if we’re lucky, share it with someone we love. 

This just might be his best hat trick ever.

[UPDATE: I had the privilege of taking my grandfather to see his adopted book in person on the stacks at the Postal Museum this past Thanksgiving. It was an experience I will cherish forever.)