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The Place Where I Live

Illustrated by Steve Varble

The Place Where I Live is a book of children's poetry — funny, tender, and rooted in the rhythms of small-town central Illinois life. Ken wrote the verse and his friend and collaborator Steve Varble supplied the artwork. The poems run from the gleefully absurd (a boy raised among the produce after his family loses him in the supermarket, a town that turns runaway pets into burgoo) to the quietly wise, like "Jimmy Smee Couldn't See," about a blind boy who notices the world more truly than the people around him. Cruise nights, oom-pah-playing mechanics, library benefactors nobody can pronounce, and a grandfather more genuine than the artificial ballpark he visits all take their turn.

Ken and Steve even drafted mock blurbs for the back cover, including this one attributed to Ken's own father: "I've been waiting my whole life for Ken to get a real job. Still waiting." — Elmer Bradbury, Ken's father.

Here is one of the collection's quieter poems, in Ken's own words:

Jimmy Smee Couldn't See

Jimmy Smee couldn't see, but everyone all thought that he knew as much as anyone about the world he'd stumbled on. Since birth he'd never seen a thing that other folks saw easily. He'd never seen the brown on cows or viewed the blue of passing clouds. He never knew what "yellow" meant (To us it seemed quite evident.)

But Jimmy Smee, without his sight, knew things we didn't know, well…like …the song of snow …the squish of rain …the smell of friendship and of pain …the music that a leaf can weave when floating freely on a breeze…

Jimmy wandered off one day…Where he went I cannot say. Our parting was a happy time…He just moved on…we didn't mind. But as the time passed by we thought about the things that Jim had taught. And it surprised us all to find…That Jimmy saw, and we were blind.