Reading: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Moving: nope

Watching: "The Stepford Wives"

Commenting (not really learning): Whoever stars in "The Stepford Wives" looks exactly like Meredith Baxter (Burney)

11 September 2000: Laura Ingalls Wilder

Last night I neglected to read either The Blind Assassin or Rose Daughter and instead channel-hopped between "North by Northwest" and "American President." Before Cary lit up my Sunday, TCM had a documentary about the making of NxNW, which I probably would have enjoyed if I'd remembered to watch it. A lot of people prefer NxNW above all other Hitchcocks, and despite its having Cary Grant I don't know why. I've probably just seen it too many times, though that hasn't impaired my love of "Philedelphia Story." I channel-hopped to Annette Bening, despite Michael Douglas, because I love the blue ballgown she wears to the state dinner. Also I read Laura Ingalls Wilder.

---

I'm loitering at my desk, idly thinking not so very much, noticing how dusty the one of my cards is--one with a black Lab that LEB sent after the 1998 Connecticut trek--meeting the gaze of the woman reading Chaucer on a postcard my sister sent, and wishing the Babe on top of my monitor were bigger for better hugging. There. I just took him down and he's safe between my arm and my side. I really want a dog. Cockatiels just aren't big enough to be hugged. I would rather look at Babe than squash him, so he's back on top of my monitor, arranged so I can look him in the eyes better.

---

My mother sent me a note. She's big on notes, whereas actual letters are extremely rare. This one had a page torn from a catalog picturing two yellow lab puppies nosing each other (whose faces she wrote on). The note said she'd found another box of books in the garrett. I had thought I had left only the one there, which is why when I was finally allowed to haul them out last November, my pleasure in my stack of V.C. Andrews was marred by the absence of my middle- and high school yearbooks and Claudia. She didn't say what was in the box and for all I know they're my sister's. But I live in hope.

Of course, if they are my yearbooks, there's a chance my mother will read the inscriptions. I wonder if I ever got my pathetic, high school crush to sign my book. I also wonder if there's a remnant of a lie in the middle school ones. In seventh grade (I hope not eighth), toward the end of the year, I made up a boyfriend. He lived in Essex, in easy car-range but remote bike-range, which is why no one in Old Lyme knew him. His name was Eric, which I guess was my favorite name at the time. His last name had seven letters and I think I derived it from my seven groups of four each who lived on my estate. The excruciatingly embarrassing thing about having made up the boyfriend is that, of course, I told people about him, in a status symbol kind of way. I have, mercifully, forgotten how I dropped him in conversation, but I know that SAS asked, in her inscription, if he were real. How excrutiatingly embarassing. I haven't remembered that in years. I think I later took a black magic marker to such incriminating evidence.

---

I don't know why I do this. It always depresses me. But I always seem to after reading any of the Little House books. I learned a long time ago that there was a son between Carrie and Grace, Charles Frederick, who died. I haven't yet fully gotten over my reaction ("Laura lied!") to learning that another couple and baby shared the house with them over the long winter, but I'm dealing. I know Nellie Olesen and Mr. Edwards are each a composite. So today I did another web search, just in case anything had changed.

It hasn't.

Mary still died. Ma and Pa still died. Carrie still died. Grace still died. Almanzo still got diphtheria and died. Laura died too. Jack never made it back to Pepin from the first period in Indian Territory and the scene at the beginning of On the Shores of Silver Lake is a flat-out lie too. Carrie and Grace married, but neither had children. Rose married and had a son, who died; she later divorced and spent the rest of her life as a confirmed spinster, nudge nudge wink wink, or so I conclude from reading between the lines. A site for children could never outright say she was lesbian, even were it certain. Too shocking, I say. Mary Powers never had children. She moved to Bellingham (The Living) around 1900 and "it's unlikely Laura ever heard from her again." Cap Garland was killed at the age of 26. Nothing is known of Ida Wright and Elmer after their marriage. Of LIW's two sets of double cousins, the sites I found traced none of their few descendants very far. After Ma and Pa died, Mary alternated with Grace and Carrie until her death. Didn't the Wilders ever return to De Smet for a visit? Did she never see Mary again? Laura outlived the rest of her family including her two younger sisters by over 20 years.

Damn.

A few days ago I came downstairs to and caught RDC watching "Alive." All these movie channels are not a good idea. He's one of the men I know who did not read Alive at 13. Even I read it, to take a break from V.C. Andrews.

So you know that makes me wonder just how hungry De Smet got during the Long Winter, anyway.