It's the kind of nostalgia that he probably would have appreciated.

You can still mourn for the stories. I'm going to be a mess when Ellison dies. It doesn't matter that he was often and enthusiastically (as derspatchel once succintly put it) a colossal dickweed; I read him for my life when I was in high school and college. He shaped so many of the ways I think about language. Bradbury's later stories became more evanescent and his politics turned out to be more conservative than I'd known in ninth grade, but I was still reading The Martian Chronicles on the bus yesterday, the 1973 Doubleday hardcover with the biographical sketch at the beginning and the bibliography at the end.

"I became a great Tarzan fan," says Ray, "and began cutting out the Burroughs comic strips and pasting them in a huge scrapbook. I had already started collecting Buck Rogers comics in 1929. I also saved Flash Gordon, and Prince Valiant was another favorite. I still have all these beautifully drawn comic adventures down in the cellar carefully packed away in an old trunk. When I want to recapture that era I just tip back the lid. A writer's past is the most important thing he has, so I've been a packrat. I've kept everything I've ever cared about."

Not all of us are able to do that. He was still one of the pieces of my past I'd keep.