"The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" [.]

[fiefoe]

'Engaging danger' is the theme that runs through most featured episodes with Bryson's best friend, Doug Willoughby. Two choice ones: the movie theater vending machine and a kid with arms like garden hoses; the confetti bomb.

• A peanut M&M that falls seventy feet into a bowl of tomato soup makes one heck of a splash, I can tell you.
• Scabs in Kid World were cultivated the way older people cultivate orchids... anyone with a nosebleed was treated like a celebrity for as long as it ran.
• I knew and could take you at once to any illustration of naked women anywhere in our house, from a Rubens painting of fleshy cherubs in Masterpieces of World Painting...
• I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting - the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma.
• Bully's hanging spit: it was a mossy green with little streaks of red blood in it and, unless my memory is playing tricks, two very small gray feathers protruding at its sides. It was so big and shiny that I could see my refection in it, distorted, as in an M.C. Escher drawing.
• the usual dispiriting experience of watching Uncle Dee turning wholesome food into flying stucco
• All children had running noses from October to April, which most of them treated as a kind of drip feed.
• (Collecting paper money): ...and then there would be another small eternity while she went off, shuffling and wobbling and humming the Alzheimer theme tune, to find her purse.
• I knew a kid named Gus Mahoney who was kept on the Mad Mouse so long, and endured so many g-forces, that for three months afterward he couldn't comb his hair forward.
• (Match fighting): the competitors arm themselves with boxes of kitchen matches, retire to the basement, turn off all the lights and spend the rest of the evening throwing lighted matches at each other in the dark.
• When Willoughby... finally figured out how to open the second drawer of the chest- there came  a whistling sound , and a slender homemade dark, about six inches long and beautifully made, embedded itself with a resonant thwoing int he chest not two inches to the left of Willoughby's fortuitously inclined head.

__ An immense oak tree... seemed always to have a private breeze running through its upper branches... This was where you sat to shuck peas or trim green beans or turn a handle to make ice cream at the tranquil, suppertime end of the day.
__ If it was one of my grandmother's treasured shows, like As the World Turns or Queen for a Day, he generally just stayed out there in case an airplane flew over and made everything lapse into distressing waviness at a critical moment. He was the most patient man who ever lived.
__ ...the amazing sight of hundreds of keen young men buffing, shampooing, and grooming their beloved porkers in the hope of winning a colored satin ribbon and bringing glory home to Grundy Center or Pisgah. It seemed an odd way to court fame.

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