Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Author: Fannie Flagg
- Language: English
- Formats: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Series: None
- Price: Free
- File Size: 1 MB
THE
BEGINNING
THE PLACE:
SOUTHERN MISSOURI
THE TIME: THE 1940s
THE MOOD: HOPEFUL
Elmwood Springs
ALMOST EVERYONE in town that had an extra room took
in a boarder. There were no apartment buildings or hotels as of
yet. The Howard Johnson was built a few years later but in the
meantime bachelors needed to be looked after and single
women certainly had to have a respectable place to live. Most
people considered it their Christian duty to take them in
whether they needed the few extra dollars a week or not, and
some of the boarders stayed on for years. Mr. Pruiet, a
bachelor from Kentucky with long thin feet, boarded with the
Haygoods so long that they eventually forgot he was not
family. Whenever they moved, he moved.
When he finally did die at seventy-eight, he was buried in the Haygood family plot
with a headstone that read:
The homes on First Avenue North were located within
walking distance of town and school and were where most of
the town’s boarders lived.
At present the Smith family’s boarder is Jimmy Head, the
short-order cook at the Trolley Car Diner; the Robinsons next
door have Beatrice Woods, the Little Blind Songbird; the
Whatleys up the street have Miss Tuttle, the high school
English teacher. Ernest Koonitz, the school’s band director and
tuba soloist, boards with Miss Alma, who, as luck would have
it, has a hearing problem. But soon the Smith family will take
in a new boarder who will set in action a chain of events that
should eventually wind up in the pages of history books. Of
course they won’t know it at the time, especially their tenyear-old son, Bobby.
He is at the moment downtown standing
outside the barbershop with his friend Monroe Newberry,
staring at the revolving red and white stripes on the electric
barber’s pole.
The game is to stare at it until they are crosseyed, which seems to them to be some sort of grand
achievement. As far as amusements go, it is on a par with
holding your breath until you pass out or dropping from a rope
into the freezing swimming hole outside of town named the
Blue Devil, so cold that even on a hot day when you hit the
water the first shock jolts you to your eyeballs, stops your
heart, and makes you see stars before your eyes. By the time
you come out your body is so numb you can’t feel where your
legs are and your lips have turned blue, hence the name. But
boys, being the insane creatures they are, cannot wait to come
crawling out covered with goose bumps and do it all over
again.
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