Ben Beagle

The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays and Wednesdays, steady as she goes.

Recent columns

• I'll find something else to do during Palin's talk
• He's sick of trying to keep up with national health debate
• Change can have its challenges
• Help! He's drowning in technology

As we have seen here before, there was a time when Old No. 36 here bought a whole lot of books in a kind of schoolboy attempt to appear suave and perfectly educated.

Now, in these hard times, I don't buy a whole lot of books, so I dust my bookcases and try to find something I used to read or not read.

I can't believe that one of these books is "The Canterbury Tales."

I am a certified English major -- which is the case because I wasn't smart enough to be a chemistry major.

I guess I just bought "The Canterbury Tales" to put on the coffee table when we had guests.

I can't understand most of these stories except for one episode in "The Wife of Bath's Tale" -- which I can't discuss here.

I kept looking and there was "The Strange Woman," which is still a pretty good read and there were some ancient cheese crumbs on pages 14, 29 and 30, at which point I must have stopped reading for a while.

But I do remember the movie version with Hedy Lamarr ruining the reputations of various people in 19th century Bangor, Maine, and remaining fully clothed the entire time.

And I recall that every member of the cast kept their clothes on including Gene Lockhart, for which we should have been grateful.

I don't know if you remember Old Gene. His daughter, June, fooled around a lot with Lassie.

If they made that movie today, everybody in Bangor would have been naked as sin, as your Aunt Zelda used to say.

And I stumbled across "Forever Amber" and recalled the movie they made starring Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde, who could have died of the plague for all I cared.

Boy. That Linda was something to write home about, wasn't she?

Then, there was a fading copy of Edna Ferber's "Giant" -- and I remembered the movie and James Dean again. Not to mention Elizabeth Taylor and, unfortunately, Rock Hudson.

Then, there was a copy of Budd Schulberg's "What Makes Sammy Run?"

If they made a movie out of that one, I missed it.

Which doesn't explain why a book published in 1941 should be in one of my bookcases.

Or why I found a book of Charles Lamb's essays that I couldn't read because the type is too small.

This is discouraging because Old No. 36 here is kind of in the essay business himself.

I have to go now.

I'm going to read "Forever Amber" again if it kills me.

Ben Beagle's column appears in Monday's Extra.