A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Today I read 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find By Flannery O'Conner. I don't (usually) cry at stories, especially ones that are only about eleven pages long. And don't get me wrong, I didn't cry, I just sat there for a really long time thinking about it. I cry over stupid things, like 'I don't get this' and 'I can't believe I did something so stupid' and some not-so-stupid things. I cried at my grandma's funeral, and over a documentary about blood diamonds. But I just didn't cry. It was weird, because when I started, I picked up my pencil and wrote down things like 'These kids are really acting badly' and that the grandmother was a little crazy. As I got to the end I completely stopped taking notes, thinking about writing down my thoughts. I wasn't writing that much before, but I completely stopped after they met him. I don't even like calling him 'The Misfit'. I don't know. I sometimes, in the Odyssey, underline whole paragraphs and then feel stupid and erase some of the underlined stuff, but I just sort of underlined everything at the very end. It was all sort of sweet, the way the grandmother wanted to earn the love and respect of her grandchildren, and she misses the way it was, and an evil part of you says that her son, Bailey, really was being a jerk. I looked back at what I wrote at the beginning and it didn't even matter to me anymore after that. I don't care where they are, why they're going, why her son was so mean. I still sort of wonder how it might have been better if she hadn't recognized him, if she hadn't smuggled the cat in, if she hadn't tried to impress her grandchildren, if she had stayed at home, or gone to 'east Tennessee'. I normally hate stories where things are so dependent on what happened before them. There were thousands of ways they could have avoided the ending, it's just upsetting that it had to be this way. It's disappointing the mother/wife never really got a part. It's sad he couldn't have even spared the baby. It's just upsetting to think there is someone who would do that to their mother, or brother. Anyone. I don't get how it can say Bailey is her only son who she lives with when it's true that there was another. Maybe she just lost him somewhere, maybe he never came back to her by choice. I don't know, but she would be the only person to know his story. Just to know that the kids might have grown up, the baby might have grown up, it's a story, but the fact that it can make you wonder about all this stuff. Over and over I've been saying to myself I don't know, I don't know. I've written it many times, and deleted a few because it's probably frustrating to read.
I could go through and highlight all the things I thought were really great ways of description, but I can't do it. I don't want to go past the first page anymore. I loved the grandma's fight, her character that tried to get away with things (like some elderly people do sometimes). I loved to hear him talk, to hesitate to think about himself. I loved the whole last half. I loved the whole story. Each time I look at what I wrote (and am writing now), I feel stupid, over and over. But I don't really want to think about it. I made it easy to forget about, I made it easy to think of something else, but I can't not think about it when I look at it. It's scary someone could write this, in a way. It's so simple. They go on a car trip and there's an accident, and a murderer on the loose who happens to be her son and kills them. The author was so careful to explain the characters that with every thing they say it makes it harder for me to think of them suddenly torn to bits by this author. I guess that's why I don't miss the mom so much. She had no name, she had nothing to say, she sat a lot, but then why do I miss the baby so much more? I keep feeling stupid I feel this way about a little made-up story, feeling stupid that I couldn't ever write like that, stupid that I don't even know what to say about this story. It's such a creepy story! How would it feel to look back and see that you created this?