I was raised watching Little House on the Prairie. You know the show, right? It was on the air for a Long Time, and we watched it religiously on Monday nights, 8 p.m. sharp. I grew up with Laura, really, and rooted for her in those schoolyard fights with Nellie Olsen, and rooted for Ma in her gracious, tight-lipped silence when Mrs. Olsen gave her flack there in the General Store. I applied my previous knowledge from reading (and re-reading) the books (my father read us all of them before I was eight years old) and wasn’t a bit surprised when Mary went blind. I even maintained my willing suspension of disbelief when Laura sported braces for several years. And with Laura, I fell in love (if only a little bit) with Almanzo. “Manley.” Who wouldn’t?
When Will was only four years old I read him Farmer Boy; this is the third in the eponymous Little House series penned by the real Laura Ingalls Wilder. And recently, I’ve begun reading Little House in the Big Woods to Emma, delighting in the familiar episodes and illustrations, marveling over the earnest hard work of those settlers’ lives, admiring the clean simplicity of Ms. Wilder’s prose.
It was an impulse buy there at the end of a harried pre-Christmas trip to the store: I bought Emma Grace the first season of Little House on the Prairie: six discs and more than fifteen episodes in all, starting with the Very First One, in which the Ingalls family comes to Walnut Grove. Emma Grace seemed pleased enough with the gift, but she didn’t know, of course, what she was getting into.
I did.
Oh, how familiar it all is! The cheerful music held down by an electric base playing something out of The Brady Bunch , and here come Laura and Mary and Baby Carrie, running down a grass-covered hillside in a landscape that looks nothing like Minnesota. And there’s Ma smiling in her indulgent and restrained way, and there’s Pa, looking merry, the apples of his cheeks aglow. Such Goodness is here, such Virtue. The values of church and the values of home and the values of an honest apology. In episode after episode we are reminded of the meaning of community or the importance of obedience, the wisdom of our elders and the benefits (they are legion) of Holding One’s Tongue.
Of course I find that my suspension of disbelief shows the wear and tear of intervening decades of irony: Who are they kidding? This is So Obviously Not Minnesota! I’d recognize that California landscape anywhere. And Mary’s hair. Really? She looks as if she plays an afternoon role at the aforementioned Brady Bunch set, stringy locks replete with uneven trim. She could trade her pinafore for a mini-skirt and voila!
But no. No. Those thoughts, while present, scarcely have time to register. I’m drawn in; I’m too far gone. Nellie Olsen is Just So Mean, and Miss Beedle is Just So Gentle. Laura and Mary in their plain, homemade dresses represent all that is Good and Right and True and resistant to the Abercrombie and Fitches and Uggs of the world. Now Ma is scolding Pa for plowing the field on a Sunday and Laura is crying because she broke Her Only Doll (imagine!). The episode we watched tonight really moved me: Pa was headed out to the barn to shoot Jack (Jack!) because he was sure he was rabid and everyone in the house was waiting for Laura to show signs of rabies, too, because they were bitten by the very same racoon, don’t you know. And my children were devasted at the thought that Jack would die (“He won’t die, will he, Mom? He can’t die, right? Because he’s one of the Main Characters!”), and I was moved (so deeply) at the thought of waiting (only waiting) to find out if your child had rabies and knowing (how awful) that, if she did, there was Nothing Anyone Could Do.
And then (and this is why we watched, isn’t it?), it was all made Beautifully Right in the end. Jack did not die. And neither, of course, did Laura.
That, my friends, is Good Television.
My children are really enjoying it. What a delight! to pass on to them something that was a mainstay of my childhood, and to watch them be drawn to it in the same way.
My mother-in-law suggested, when I told her I’d bought this, that I’d really bought it for myself, but I didn’t. I really and truly bought it for Emma. I’m so glad she likes it.
Nonetheless. I’ve noticed something this time, something I never noticed before when, at ten or eleven or twelve years old, I switched on the television at 8 p.m. on a Monday night. I don’t think I could have noticed it then; I think it was Beyond Me. But it is Not Beyond Me Now. No.
I’ve seen it. I’ve noticed. When in the first episode Doc Baker had to wrap his chest because he broke his ribs falling from that giant tree that he climbed to fetch the girls’ kite. When in tonight’s episode he went out to the barn in the dead of the night in only his breeches and suspenders. It was a fact that I really wasn’t alive to “back in the day,” as they say. Michael Landon is- er, was- only two years older than my father, after all.
But here’s the Truth of the matter, O Reader, and I never appreciated it before in all my years of Little House viewing: Michael Landon was Hot.
There it is. It’s out there. I’ve said it.
Maybe it’s just that I’m older now, so that fathers of youngish children appeal to me. Maybe it’s that I’ve moved (far) past the appeal of immature youths. Or maybe it’s just one of those things that I couldn’t have known before.
Well, I know it now. Yes, I do.
