GOOD NIGHT, JOHN-BOY
How is it I never realized just how handsome Pa was?!
Oh. Perhaps it was because I was six. And only now, five decades on, my old eyes are seeing him anew – Michael Landon in suspenders, Michael Landon in a hand-wrung, breeze-dried shirt. Landon hewing logs in the moon and snow, muscles and tendons flexing beneath his sun-brown skin.
But, thinking now, six wasn’t all that young; I’d already had my first kiss. Me and Les McKeown had already had a smooch. He was baycityrolling on the TOTP soundstage, and I was up out of my Ducky Daddles jumpseat, squishing my lips to the screen of a Panasonic telly. Yes, by six, I was a seasoned snogger.
But that’s not the point here.
So it’s New Year’s Day, my 55th in this skin, and it’s just as bleak as it always is – another grim marker between what-I-didn’t— and what-I-probably-still-won’t do. I should be better at it by now; reckoning, I mean, with failure and pointlessness.
But, hang on, here comes Landon on my Roku. And he’s doing something strenuous, smiling kindly.
He’s making a dining table and six chairs from a knotty, fallen pine; a doll for a blind girl in town and – it turns out – a built up shoe for Olga. And he’s looking pretty sexy while he’s at it. He has his back into something; the sweat beads. He rakes a muscular hand through that glossy, raven hair. And he’s making do; he’s making ends meet. I like how it looks.
And here are the others: Old Laura (who hasn’t aged). She still wears her hair that way – those godforsaken plaits – and her teeth are just as buck. Ma still casts her dewy light over the pebbly flank of a prairie hillside, which then manages to reach all the way to a sofa in St. Louis and throw some rather dark light on me.
Where are my warm smiles? Where’s my pail of warm milk divvied preciously (and fairly) between a frocked gaggle of rough-and-tumble-but-essentially-good offspring?
But, really, the show was ahead of its time. Because here’s Olga in that built-up shoe knocking it out of the park with a bat made of swizzle sticks. And here’s still-not-pretty Whatsit getting her comeuppance because she’s spoiled and has a main line to candy since her daddy owns the town sweet shop. There are messages here, it occurs to me, and they’re still worth listening to.
And this feels timely because in this grim, gray gap between Christmas and New Year, I’ve been thinking a lot about lack and its possible connection to joyfulness.
And I’ve been thinking about hangovers. Especially right now, this minute, where opened gifts litter the surfaces like uptipped, empty glasses the morning after a piss-up. And the only light source, this ink-dark pre-dawn of January 1, comes from the bank app on my phone screen. It’s a semi-pleasant, bluey-green light, but based on what it’s saying to me it ought to be red. And it really ought to flash.
AB - 01.05.24