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I found it interesting that the date is set as the summer of 1928. Was that the 8 years old Ray Douglas Bradbury, the son of Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, or was it last idyllic summer before the changes of the Great Depression, WW2 and the Atomic Age? Possibly both?
Bradbury was born and lived his early years in Waukegan, which seems to have been quite a bit grittier than Green Town. Was Bradbury constructing an idealized past?
I enjoyed the image of the grandfather standing on the porch like the captain of a ship, "like Ahab surveying the mild mild day" and acknowledging "the salutes of other captains on yet other flowered porches, out themselves to discern the gentle ground swell of weather".
Was Bradbury thinking of the opening of Chapter 36 in Moby Dick, where "Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden". If so, it is a neat inversion of Melville's simile. Yet, unlike Douglas' grandfather, the narrator in Moby Dick refers to Ahab's "overbearing grimness" upon first sight.
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