Across the street lived the most special child of all

Across the street lived the most special child of all, Mitzi Polk, daughter of Minor and Margaret Polk. Mitzi had a loud roaring laugh. She would swing so high on her swing set the poles of the NFL Elite Jersey frame would come up out of the ground, as she bellowed at the top of her lungs, Billy sucks a bottle! Billy sucks a bottle! She drove me nuts. After all, I was getting to be a big boy and I did no such thing.
I later learned that Mitzi was developmentally disabled. The term wouldnt have meant anything to me then, but when I pushed to expand opportunities for the disabled as governor and President, I thought often of Mitzi Polk.
A lot happened to me while I lived on Thirteenth Street. I started school at Miss Marie Purkins School for Little Folks kindergarten, which I loved until I broke my leg one day jumping rope. And it wasnt even a moving rope. The rope in the playground was tied at one Tom Brady Jersey Elite end to a tree and at the other end to a swing set. The kids would line up on one side and take turns running and jumping over it. All the other kids cleared the rope.
One of them was Mack McLarty, son of the local Ford dealer, later governor of Boys State, all-star quarterback, state legislator, successful businessman, and then my first White House chief of staff. Mack always cleared every hurdle. Luckily for me, he always waited for me to catch up.
Me, I didnt clear the rope. I was a little chunky anyway, and slow, so slow that I was once the only kid at an Easter egg hunt who didnt get a single egg, not because I couldnt find them but because I couldnt get to them fast enough. On the day I tried to jump rope I was wearing cowboy boots to school. Like a fool, I didnt take the boots off to jump. My heel caught on the rope, I turned, fell, and heard my leg snap. I lay in agony on the ground for several minutes while Daddy raced over from the Buick place to get me.
I had broken my leg above the knee, and because I was growing so fast, the doctor was reluctant to put me in a cast up to my hip. Instead, he made a hole through my ankle, pushed a stainless steel bar through it, attached it to a stainless steel horseshoe, and hung my leg up in the air over my hospital bed. I lay like that for two months, flat on my back, feeling both foolish and pleased to be out of school and receiving so many visitors. I took a long time getting over that leg break. After I got out of the hospital, my folks bought me a bicycle, but I never lost my fear of riding without the training wheels. As a result, I never stopped feeling that I was clumsy and without a normal sense of balance until, at the age of twenty-two, I finally started riding a bike at Oxford. Even then I fell a Rob Gronkowski Elite Jersey few times, but I thought of it as building my pain threshold.
I was grateful to Daddy for coming to rescue me when I broke my leg. He also came home from work a time or two to try to talk Mother out of spanking me when I did something wrong. At the beginning of their marriage he really tried to be there for me. I remember once he even took me on the train to St. Louis to see the Cardinals, then our nearest major league baseball team. We stayed overnight and came home the next day. I loved it. Sadly, it was the only trip the two of us ever took together. Like the only time we ever went fishing together. The only time we ever went out into the woods to cut our own Christmas tree together. The only time our whole family took an out-of-state vacation together. There were so many things that meant a lot to me but were never to occur again. Roger Clinton really loved me and he loved Mother, but he couldnt ever quite break free of the shadows of self-doubt, the phony security of binge drinking and adolescent partying, and the isolation from and verbal abuse of Mother that kept him from becoming the man he might have been.