Walnut Grove, Minn.- Recent reports indicate that Charles Ingalls wishes that a man who interrupted the Ingalls family dinner by kicking open the door and wielding a shotgun had waited for a clear night to do so.
“In this family, you never know what might happen when you’re just having an ordinary family dinner,” Charles comments. “I’m a really involved member of the community, so naturally sometimes situations arise that need immediate attention. Sometimes this happens during dinner. Okay, no problem. But the thing is, when Mr. Webb came wanting to shoot Albert because he thought he was the father of Sylvia’s baby, well, it was storming. I mean it was really coming down. I don’t have a problem with having dinner interrupted while I punched and then comforted Mr. Webb, but then I had to take him home and it was just pouring so much.”
While Charles acknowledges that both he and Albert had already been soaked by the time he told Albert to hitch up the team so they could take Mr. Webb home, he does note that “if Mr. Webb had done this on a clear evening,” no one would have been soaked at all.
“I mean, what am I going to do?” Charles continues. “I’m already soaked, so it’s not like I’m going to get wetter taking him home. At this point I’m pretty much committed to that path, plus my history of fixing problems in the town kind of creates these expectations, you know?”
Charles knows that he goes above and beyond continually and has set a very high standard, which he insists is “not a problem.” However, just once he would have appreciated the right thing being the easy thing.
“I don’t have a lot of clothes, you know, so when I get soaked it’s like this whole ordeal that disrupts the clothing rotation,” Charles shares.
Charles finishes by asserting that he is of course “happy to help,” but sometimes helping is more convenient when it’s “nice and dry out.”
After laughing for about five minutes, Charles commented that he was glad that Mr. Webb hadn’t interrupted his bedtime coffee routine, because “then we would have had a real problem.”
