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Uncle Buddy, a lively (and off-color) raconteur, regaled the young Clinton with tales of hunting dogs, life's ironies and the maxims people should live * by. Asked about his own family tragedies, he told his nephew, "Yes, life's tough, but I signed on for the whole trip." To this day Clinton calls his Uncle Buddy "the wisest man I ever met." (Clinton talks Southern hyperbole, which raises a language barrier for some Northerners.) He describes his uncle and his mother in the same terms: they have weathered many trials with unfailing equilibrium and good humor. There is a streak in the Arkansas character that militates against expecting too much from life (and militates, as well, against political reform). I am not as surprised as I was when Clinton first told me that one of his favorite books is the stoical Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Clinton left Hope when he was seven, moving north to Hot Springs, but he and his mother were frequently back for relatives' graduations and funerals, for the Watermelon Festival, for long talks with Uncle Buddy. Clinton calls his grandfather and his uncle "the main male influences in my childhood." He kept up with all the interconnected family gossip and vicissitudes that make life in a small Arkansas town seem like an open-air soap opera. A thousand times over, Clinton heard and told the tale of how Uncle Buddy decided one day to "stop making a damn fool of myself" by heavy drinking -- and did it. Little moral sagas, losses taken with resignation, unexpected gains, made up the texture of Hope life. The marks of a small town are still on him, the intimate questions asked even of strangers, the touching and hugging at every entry to a house, the relaxed slouching walk Clinton shares with his mother. He may have done some bustling around the world of Yale and Oxford, but his preferred rhythms are the slow ones of his birthplace.
HOT SPRINGS
When Virginia Blythe (as she then was) retrieved her son from the relatives and married her second husband, Roger Clinton, this should have been a return to stability for the boy who had been handed around the small town. Instead, he experienced his first disorientation in this restored life with two parents. Roger Clinton's anger was explosive when he drank. In one of his rages, he fired a gun into the wall and was taken off to jail -- a searing memory for Clinton, and grist for the busy rumor mills of Hope.
The couple tried for a new start in Hot Springs. Roger Clinton, who had been selling Buicks in a town with little demand for new or expensive cars, joined his brother in a more prosperous dealership in the state's most affluent resort town. Virginia, meanwhile, got steadier work, better remunerated, as a nurse anesthetist. At first the Clintons lived in the country, in a house without indoor plumbing. Much has been made of Clinton's encounters with snakes in the outhouse, but he says, "We were not poor. A lot of rural Arkansas had no sewers back then." Billy was taken into town to attend a Catholic school, rather than the inferior county school nearer home. It was his first experience of Arkansas' dreary educational establishment.