5
LARRY WAS NEVER BORED. That is, he was never bored within the books. I knew from experience that everyone my age was bored for a significant amount of time every day. It may have been the absence of boredom that made me truly understand how much of Larry’s life was missing from the Adventures of Larry Peters, that made me begin to understand how distorted was the picture of Larry’s life that we, the readers, Larry’s admirers, were allowed to see. It seemed safe to assume, for example, that the Peters family ate dinner every evening, or nearly every evening. Logic told me that not all of these dinners could be interrupted by events that were part of one adventure or another. There had to be dinners when no one had much to say, when Larry poked at his peas with his fork, watched a skin form on his gravy, and didn’t hear his father asking him what he was daydreaming or moping about.
Not only was Larry never bored within the books, but he was always busy. He was always working on one project or another, and taking the trash out was never one of them. Larry seemed very clever to me, as he must have to all readers, as he was intended to seem, and yet for all his cleverness, for all the things he knew, for all his work on one arcane project or another, he managed to be an all-round guy. He could make a good showing in a fight, even against hired thugs, run like a deer when the situation required it, climb cliffs or warehouse walls, tap phone lines, swim, fish, play chess. In fact, I had the idea, an idea encouraged by most of the things that occurred in the books, that there was probably nothing a boy my age might want to do that Larry couldn’t do. If Larry never sang or danced or played the clarinet or baked a soufflé or cast sculpture in bronze or flew an airplane, it wasn’t because he couldn’t, it was simply because he didn’t feel like it or because the occasion for doing so hadn’t yet arisen in one of his adventures. In fact, I now recall that he did bake a soufflé and fly an airplane in The Aerobatic Sous-Chef.
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🎧 187: Larry was never bored.