Shelley Fabares

           

            On Sunday I read Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, about a drifter that married an old woman’s developmentally challenged daughter just so he could get the woman’s car and drive away. O’Connor had a unique descriptive style. The daughter’s eyes were blue as a peacock’s neck.

            I also read O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” which is my favourite of the three stories of hers I’ve come across. A young man rides with his mother on the bus. There is a general bitterness among the White people of his mother’s generation because the busses have been desegregated. The young man is a liberal and rejects his mother’s attitude but he is in an awkward position because he lives with and depends upon her. A big Black woman gets on the bus wearing the exact same ridiculous hat that his mother is wearing.

            I re-read, this time aloud, the second essay of Nietzsche’s “A Genealogy of Morals”. The bad conscience has resulted from the turning of our will inward. The only hope for humanity is the Superman.

            In organizing the files in my new external hard drive, I accidentally deleted an entire video folder. It was weird how fast it happened. I was moving things into folders and deleting other things and when a message came up saying there was no room for the long names of the videos in the recycle bin, I ended up clicking “OK” to just deleting it forever, thinking it was something else. I thought that I still had all the files on my main drive, but it turned out that I lost all the Alfred Hitchcock films that I’d archived because I had specifically moved those over on Saturday to make room. I guess I’ll have to download them all over again, though I recall it was a long process.

            I read Donald Barthelme’s take on the Bluebeard fairy tale. He made the character of Bluebeard a lot less horrible and a lot more bizarre.

            I read Douglas Glover’s “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon”. It’s the story of a break-up told in a highly complex, academic and intellectual way. The writing was both impressive and annoying at the same time.

            I watched the last episode of the first season of the Donna Reed Show. Although there was nothing earth shaking about the series, it was a charming and well-acted show. Instead of Donna playing a madcap fumbler like Lucille Ball or someone who’s emotions are out of control, like Mary Tyler Moore, Donna tended to be the calm one who always saved her family from chaos. There was also something special about Shelley Fabares, who played Donna’s daughter, starting at the age of fourteen. She later had a hit record with “Johnny Angel” and I only just found out that she’s been married to Mike Farrell for thirty years. She’s still quite attractive even in her seventies.