Reflection on Bill Bryson's Memoir
Excerpts from the book The
Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid A Memoir by Bill Bryson that I most
enjoyed and will remember the best:
“Recently I
returned to the R&T looking for illustrations for this book, and discovered
to my astonishment that the picture library today occupies a very small room at
the back of the building and that nearly all the old pictures were thrown out
some years ago.
“They need
the space,” Jo Ann Donaldson, the present librarian, told me with a slightly
apologetic look.
I found
this a little hard to take in. “They didn’t give them to the state historical
society?” I asked.
She shook
her head.
“Or the
city library? Or a university?”
She shook
her head twice more. “They were recycled for the silver in the paper,” she told
me.
So now not
only are the places mostly gone, but there is no record of the either.”
“He was
always rebuilding something –a lawn mower or a washing machine; something with
fan belts and blades and lot of swiftly whirring parts – and always cutting himself
fairly spectacularly. At some point, he would fire of the thing up, reach in to
make an adjustment, and almost immediately go, “Dang!” and pull out a bloody,
slightly shredded hand. He would hold it up before him and for some time,
wiggling the fingers, as his he didn’t recognize it.” (Him describing his
grandfather.)
“But when
you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be a uniform
leaded gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts,
some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to
plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size
of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp
out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself
to some foreign object –a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a
passing animal –and becoming an infinitely long string.” (Describing a model
airplane kit.)
Reflecting
on Bill Bryson’s writing, it is clear to see that he has a way of presenting
most events that happened in his life through humor. He starts off telling you
that his book isn’t about much of anything, and in fact, that is the truth. He
tells many stories of his childhood, small memories, just for the reader to get
the hint of a taste for 1950’s life.
Something
that is presented quiet clearly through is writing is common experience and how
it shapes every one of us. From brief stories of his grandfather and the
entertainment sought out, you are able to relate to what he has to say. No, it
isn’t a completely significant event that occurred, but we all that have that
crazy person in our family who is a grease monkey that is brilliant and yet not
so smart at times and we know the frustrations of putting together the many
toys that shaped out childhood. It isn’t a big deal, but it was a way of life.
Bill Bryson
does an amazing job at describing the simple pleasures of life in a light that
makes them seem much less torturing then they once were.. We will never be able
to go back to the 1950s (unless time travel does exist in the future) nor will
life ever be how it once was. Having a record of how things were is very import
to him. In his last couple of chapters, you can see how sad he was to have
things change to vastly. His hometown wasn’t changed; it was made the same as
the rest of the world. Loosing its touch as being different and homey, but
turning into a chain – like the many restaurants that now have come in. His
book being nothing but a reflecting of his past was written not tell a story,
but to record history.
