Little Britches – more grit

A couple of years ago, Rachel showed up on my doorstep with a bag full of books.  “Gotta read,” she said, and thrust them into my hands.  It was the beginning of my odd journey with Little Britches.

As I have said before, and will probably say every time I talk about the things that are of paramount importance to me: what children read is really, really important.  The stories they are told are really REALLY important. The books you give them should ring like bells.  And you should be reading everything they read and watching everything they watch.

  I wanted my kids to entertain themselves with stories of honor, of creativity and determination and can-do.  I looked for well written books that demonstrated honesty, courage (remember that you can only be brave if you’re scared first), integrity in every genre from adventure to funny.  Sadly, it’s hard to find that stuff in anything published in the last several decades.  Not impossible, not as long as you have editors like Rosemary Brosnan in New York.  But it’s tough.

I’ve probably told you about the woman I met when I accepted the CA Young Reader’s Medal years ago.  My address to some five hundred children’s librarians and teachers had centered on the essential experience of reading as a shaper of context and paradigm, and a predictor of quality of life (except I used none of those words at all.  It was really a pretty good darn little speech actually).  I spoke then of the need to find every possible way of infusing a child’s soul with hope, with joy, with compassion and integrity.

I’m stuffing my hands in my mouth right now.  I don’t want to tangent off into – why the devil would you waste time you can never get back letting kids watch throw away, twinkie TV –  Mmmurph.  Mmurble (the sound of one hand stuffing).

Anyway, this nice lady librarian and I started talking as I signed her books.  She told me that she, herself, had been born into a pretty terrible situation.  That her family had offered her little but abuse and the ugly side of reality.  “You know who actually saved me?  Who literally brought me up to be what I am?”  This was an exceedingly civilized looking woman, and sweet looking.  “Who?” I asked her.  She smiled, “The Bobbsey twins.  Their parents brought me up.”  And she meant it.  Literally.

In an age where publishers yearn for “edge,” where angst is big bucks, we look back at books like Stratemeyer Syndicate’s Bobbsey twins’ series with a condescending tolerance.  They were not literature, certainly.  Lightweight.  Silly stuff.  Worse—happy stuff.  (How is it, I wonder, that dark and hopeless reeks to us human sorts of significance, while anything that is simple and happy instantly equals simple minded and quaint?  And yet, ain’t it always been so?  We live in an age of miracles, but nobody’s happy.  Somebody says to us, “I know that you’re a busy woman,” and we say “Thank you,” as though busy is some kind of compliment.  We one-up each other with worst-case tales of woe.  And romance must be hopeless.)

Yeah – I’m wandering again, and parentheses are no excuse.  If you are dying to know my opinion about all this, I’ll send you here: https://krandle.com/pages/about/EnglishJournal.html 

The point is that I cannot underscore deeply enough the significance of offering kids healthy patterns: this woman learned how to have manners because the Bobbseys had to learn them.  She learned how parents should treat their kids by watching the Bobbseys’ parents, by reading the words they used.  By watching them discipline.  And she learned their values: the importance of telling the truth, of spending wisely, of being kind.  These are such simple things – and yet, we forget that children don’t come loaded with these plugins from the factory.  They have to learn them.  And they will learn – to the good or the bad – from watching their own families, the behavior they see at school, and the stories they are told.  Because the stories actually install the patterns.  Just think of a book or a TV show or a movie as a disk image.

I wanted my kids to grow up to be of the essential American spirit: you need to do something, you figure out how to do it.  You do it honorably, you don’t whine, you do what is necessary for as long as it is necessary, and you thank God every step of the way for love, for your hands, your eyes, your freedom to speak and learn.  So I wanted all that stuff in the books my kids were going to curl up with at night.  I wanted other witnesses to tell them: this is what’s cool and important.

Back to Little Britches.  I’d heard the title, but never read the books.  But I went through that bag in short order, amazed at what I was reading.  The first one is called Father and I Were Ranchers.  It is, especially in this first book, an autobiographical account of Moody’s growing up at the turn of the twentieth century.

And there is plenty of grit throughout the entire series. Again, the narration is dispassionate; Ralph just lives his life, observing and experiencing almost unbelievable things as a boy would.  And dealing.  Better than dealing.  Thinking his way through.  I believe that in this book, I had my first glimmer of understanding that the water I take for granted every day is NOT a given in real life.  Later, when I found myself chasing irrigation water at three o’clock of a July morning, I understood even more clearly.

There is such triumph in this story, won by small degrees – and tragedy almost too terrible to bear. (I will warn you that there is one scene in this first book that was too much for me—so you read it before you give it to a kid.) And adventure.  Ralph is all boy—at least I’d never ride something I knew was gonna buck my little self into the dust, just to learn how to lick it.

Did I mention there are horses in these books, too?

(Forgive me using Wikipedia, please):

“As Moody put it: ‘My goal in writing is to leave a record of the rural way of life in this country during the early part of the 20th century, and to point up the values of the era which I feel that we, as a people, are letting slip away from us.'”  Article compiled by Pat Massengill                  

And yeah, we are letting these things slip away from us.  I don’t want my kids seeing themselves as victims in their own lives.  I don’t want them waiting for somebody else to solve their problems.  I don’t want them to be defeated by hail storms or financial crises.  I want them to realize that, at the initial point of defeat, they can call on their ingenuity.  They can look around, get ideas, see new paths and take the steps to begin a new direction.  I want them to think in three hundred and sixty degrees, like birds or fish.  I want them to have joy in the challenges. To think analytically, but always from the standpoint of hope. I want them taking responsibility for their choices, owning their own lives.  And any friend I can find to help me inculcate this kind of dignity and self-sufficiency and wild freedom in my kids is a friend, indeed.

So I guess I’ll conclude with this: I want to own this entire series.  The whole dang thing.  And someday, maybe Frazz will read them all.  And be eager to become a man.