Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

I luv Ruby
My love smoldered in the margins of great books.
By Stephen J. Lyons
[04/13/00]

Ethan is on the front porch, reading
I turn away, so my dyslexic son won't see my tears.
By Virginia Tubeck-Drozd
[04/12/00]

From household saint to social pariah
In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Martha Stewart let it slip that the real reason she's leaving Westport, Conn., is because she's lonely.
By Kate Moses
[04/11/00]

Gift rage
Damn the silverware, smash the crystal. I can't take the accouterments of middle-class marriage.
By Mary Valle
[04/11/00]

Image-conscious
We want your photos -- just the best ones, please -- for our new feature.

[04/10/00]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

When this friend was 9 years old, she went with her family on a fancy cruise through Scandinavia, a trip full of planned activities and dinners with lots of silver and china. There were no other children on board besides her brother, and as it happened, she was in the throes of an obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the "Little House" book my friend was reading on this cruise, Laura and her older sister Mary endure a particularly hard winter. At some point during this difficult season, each girl is given what seems to her to be a miraculous, extravagant gift: a single baked potato. As it was the late 1800s on the Great Plains, and there was snow everywhere, and the Ingalls family didn't always have money for luxuries like salt, they ate the plain potatoes and were grateful.

Ballet Shoes By Noel Streatfield Random House Fiction Little House on the Prairie By Laura Ingalls Wilder Harper Collins, 335 pages Fiction Betsy and Tacy By Maud Hart Lovelace Harper Trophy, 144 pages Fiction Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill By Maud Hart Lovelace Harper Trophy, 192 pages Fiction Also Today I luv Ruby My love smoldered in the margins of great books. By Stephen J. Lyons

Back on the luxury cruise liner in 1973, my friend was so enmeshed in this tale, so convinced that she, too, was living in a log cabin and wearing a patched, hand-me-down calico dress, that when she joined her parents for dinner in the ship's dining room she insisted on having a baked potato. Naturally, it had to be plain. Her parents -- whom she had started to call "Ma" and "Pa" -- were mystified.

"It was solidarity with Laura," she explained to me, years later. "It was absolutely crucial that I showed my allegiance to her. It made total sense to me."

And, despite the decades that have elapsed since I last read the Little House series, it made total sense to me, too.

I, too, once enacted private demonstrations of my loyalty to Laura Ingalls Wilder that were misunderstood, or just plain missed, by the world at large. It didn't matter that her story unfolded in another century and another, rural setting. To me, she was simply a girl like myself -- a girl with straight brown hair and a tendency to run just a little bit wild. I can remember waking up one morning in my native Manhattan, all ready to go out and roast a pig's tail over an open fire, just the way the Ingalls family did. It seemed only natural. Concrete? Gone. Takeout Chinese? Never heard of it. More than anything, I longed to see someone construct a log cabin by hand.

Of course, pig's tails are rather hard to come by in modern-day Manhattan. But even though I never got around to lighting that particular barbecue, I truly believed that I knew what it would be like to do it.

Laura was not alone. Like many little girls who grow up reading far into the night by flashlight, I had a whole coterie of literary friends who dwelled somewhere in the liminal space between imaginary and real. These fictional girls, much more than my actual peers, were the friends who advised me and challenged me to think about things outside the world that I already knew. All the real girls I knew were a lot like me, after all. I wanted to know what else -- and who else -- was out there.

And so I met Betsy Ray, the gap-toothed heroine of Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series, set in Minnesota at the turn of the century. In a world of housewives and mothers, Betsy wanted to be a writer. (There was no lack of determined little girls in that household -- her sister Julia wanted to be an opera singer.) She kept a cigar box filled with paper and pencils nailed up in the V of a tree in her yard, and went up there to write when the spirit moved her. Later, her mother transformed an old theatrical costume trunk into a desk for Betsy, which seemed to me to be just about the best thing a writer could possess.

Next page | A girl-sized pair of mechanic's overalls