Enid Markey

            It was a bit cool overnight and the heat would have kicked on if the landlord hadn’t turned it off. My elderly upstairs neighbour Caesar had caused the ceiling in the second floor hallway to leak by pouring water on his radiator to cool it down because he was so hot he couldn’t stand it. That doesn’t mean the landlord should be turning off the furnace in early April. The temperature in apartments should be 21 degrees and if it isn’t the landlord is breaking the law. 

            I memorized the second verse and the chorus for “Tic tac toe” by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            In the late morning I went down to No Frills. The grapes were in bad shapes. I got a bag of oranges, three vine tomatoes, three mangoes, a wedge of two year old Canadian cheddar, mouthwash, a can of coffee, a bag of kettle chips, extra virgin olive oil, lemonade and orange juice. 

            I weighed 89.1 kilos at lunch time. I had seven saltines and three slices of five year old cheddar with some lemonade. 

            I took a siesta at 14:00. When I get up from an afternoon sleep I often feel hopeless for a few minutes before the soggy groggies go away. It’s not like in the morning when I can wake myself up with yoga. 

            I weighed 88.8 kilos at 18:00. 

            I continued with my third reading of lecture notes and had them pared down to 38 pages by 19:30. I got tired and decided to lie down for half an hour but ended up waking up at 20:19.

            I weighed 89.5 at 20:25. 

            For dinner I had two strips of bacon, fried egg and warmed up naan with a beer while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story we see for the first time Barney’s living situation. He rents a room from an elderly woman named Mrs Mendelbright, who is very nice but forbids cooking in the room or using anything higher than a forty watt bulb. She catches Barney cooking with a hot plate and using a seventy watt bulb and evicts him. Barney moves in to the back room at the court house but it doesn’t work out for his social life with Thelma Lou. Barney apologizes to Mrs Mendelbright and she accepts but it’s too late to get his room back because she’s already rented it to a man her age named Mr Fields. Barney becomes suspicious when he learns that Mrs. Mendelbright has decided to marry Mr Fields shortly after him moving in. She takes all her savings from the bank to pay her share of a house Fields says he’s buying for them in Raleigh. Barney is sure that Fields is a scammer and so he gets Andy to check on him. Sure enough he is a con artist and they catch him just as he is trying to run off with Mrs Mendelbright’s money while she’s packing. Barney gets his room back and Mrs Mendelbright says he can cook now.

            Mrs Mendelbright was played by Enid Markey, who looked like she could be Cyndi Lauper’s mother. She was a silent film star and starred in The Yankee Way in 1917. A year later in the first adaptation of Tarzan of the Apes she was the first actor to ever play Jane, just three years after Edgar Rice Burroughs created the character. She played the same character in The Romance of Tarzan. She starred in Sink or Swim in 1920. After that she switched to theatre to learn to act because she was tired of making faces in silent movies and didn’t return to the screen until 1960.