Read Online The Life And Times Of The Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (v5.0) by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online Page A

sort of person who wouldn’t get off her ass if her chair was on fire, made a special visit to have a look at me and laughed so hard she popped a button on her blouse.
    Kookie, of course, never wore anything remotely like Capri pants. I asked my sister about this after school. “Are you
kidding
?” she said. “Kookie Kookson is
not
homosexual.”
                      
    IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to hold my mother’s forgetfulness against her for long because it was so obviously and helplessly pathological, a quirk of her nature. We might as well have become exasperated with her for having a fondness for polka dots and two-tone shoes. It’s what she was. Besides, she made up for it in a thousand ways—by being soft and kind, patient and generous, instantly and sincerely apologetic for every wrong, keen to make amends. Everybody in the world adored my mother. She was entirely without suspicion or malice. She never raised her voice or said no to any request, never said a word against another human being. She liked everybody. She lived to make sandwiches. She wanted everyone to be happy. And she took me almost every week to dinner and the movies. It was the thing she and I did together.
    Because of his work my father was gone most weekends, so every Friday, practically without fail, my mother would say to me, “What do you say we go to Bishop’s for dinner tonight and then take in a movie?” as if it were a rare treat, when in fact it was what we did nearly every week.
    So at the conclusion of school on Fridays I would hasten home, drop my books on the kitchen table, grab a handful of cookies, and proceed downtown. Sometimes I caught a bus, but more often I saved the money and walked. It was only a couple of miles and the route was all diverting and agreeable if I went along Grand Avenue (where the buses didn’t go; they were relegated to Ingersoll—the servants’ entrance of the street world). I liked Grand Avenue very much. In those days it was adorned from downtown to the western suburbs with towering, interlaced elms, the handsomest street-side tree ever and a generous provider of drifts of golden leaves to shuffle through in autumn. But more than this, Grand felt the way a street should feel. Its office buildings and apartments were built close to the road, which gave the street a kind of neighborliness, and it still had most of its old homes—mansions of exuberant splendor, nearly all with turrets and towers and porches like ships’ decks—though these had now mostly found other uses as offices, funeral homes, and the like. Interspersed at judicious intervals were a few grander institutional buildings: granite churches, a Catholic girls’ high school, the stately Commodore Hotel (with an awninged walkway leading to the street—a welcome touch of Manhattan), a spooky orphanage where no children ever played or stood at a window, the official residence of the governor, a modest mansion with a white flagpole and the state flag. All seemed somehow exactly in proportion, precisely positioned, thoughtfully dressed and groomed. It was the perfect street.
    Where it ceased being residential and entered the downtown, by the industrial-scale hulk of the Meredith Publishing Building (home of
Better Homes and Gardens
magazine), Grand made an abrupt dogleg to the left, as if it suddenly remembered an important appointment. Originally from this point it was intended to proceed through the downtown as a kind of Midwestern Champs-Élysées, running up to the steps of the state capitol building. The idea was that as you progressed along Grand you would behold before you, perfectly centered, the golden-domed glory of the capitol building (and it
is
quite a structure, one of the best in the country).
    But when the road was being laid out sometime in the second half of the 1800s there was a heavy rain in the night and apparently the surveyors’ sticks moved—at least that was what we were always told—and the road