Chapter 23: Sleepy Memories

As the Super Chief rolled across the Kansas countryside and on into the night, I settled into my seat and tried to get some sleep. The steady methodical clickety-clack of the rails was restful and comforting, and I soon found myself in the twilight space between sleep and wakefulness. I found myself remembering another sleepy time of warmth and comfort...

I’m about six-years-old, and I can’t sleep. It is late at night and I sneak across the hall into my brother’s room. He has gone to visit his grandfather. For the evening, I will have the room to myself. It is snowing, and shadows of snowflakes drift down on the walls of his bedroom as the streetlight outside his window casts a warm glow.

Crawling under the blankets, I lie on my side and watch the shadows of flakes weaving between the patterns of the wallpaper. Looking all around I notice that shadows are drifting down on every wall of the room.

With just a little pretending, I can stop the falling flakes and as they become stationary, it is I who is rising toward the heavens. The illusion shifts back and forth between falling shadows and me floating and flying through the snowy night.

Not all visits to my brother’s room are so peaceful and tranquil. Another time when I went sneaking into his room, I found myself living the worst nightmare of my life. It was well past my bedtime on the Sunday evening of May 8, 1955, when I joined my brother to listen to the radio show X Minus One.

I’m almost seven years old...

Tonight’s show is a live broadcast of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction short story, “Mars Is Heaven!” My parents have forbidden me to listen to the show. Naturally, I take their ban as an endorsement.

As I sneak into my brother’s room, he is fiddling with his transistor radio. Wilfred is checking the battery. Satisfied that it has enough power to last for the entire broadcast, he slips it into the radio and with a click of the switch, we hear the welcome sound of static.

For the next few minutes, Wilfred searches the airwaves for our station until at last we hear the show’s theme song playing loud and clear. We make the final adjustments to our blanket shelter that we’ve constructed to keep our activities from the prying eyes of our mother.

Wilfred has a battery-powered flashlight. The battery is so weak that it barely has enough juice to make the filament in the tiny bulb glow. It is useless. The street lamp outside his window illuminates the room in a soft yellowish-orange light.

Radio Theater is a remarkable art form. Using nothing more than the voices of actors and the skill of the sound effect men, the producers can transport listeners to any point in time from an English Man ‘o War in a pitched battle to a spaceship landing on a distant planet.