From outside the box

If your over 40, you probably remember The Andy Griffith Show. The show was well written for it's time and it had outstanding characters. But to most of us, the magic of that show was not the characters or the story lines, but the idea of the small town these characters lived in. Over the years, Mayberry has become synonymous with small town America.

The magic of Mayberry is that it was always spring, there was always a gentle breeze ruffling thru the trees, nobody worked too hard, there was no crime other than Otis the town drunk having a couple too many on Saturday night, everybody knew everybody, there wasn't much traffic, and the idea of sitting in an old rocking chair on a creaky porch on a warm summer evening and just listening to the crickets is, well....pure magic.

I was looking for Mayberry when I moved to Chico in 1972. Actually, I was looking for Mayberry-with-a-little-pop, and Chico fit the bill perfectly. Over the years, Chico has developed a little more "pop" than I had hoped it would, but it still works. Whenever I think Chico is getting too busy, all I have to do is spend a day in Sacramento or San Francisco and presto!!, Chico becomes a small quiet town again.

If I had to pick out one town in our area that most resembles Mayberry, I'd have to pick Biggs. The downtown is very Mayberryish and I'm sure everybody knows everybody there. I bet you could walk the boarder of that whole town in about an hour. I wonder if they have a barber shop where the men gather to gossip and talk about last nights high school ball game while a guy named Floyd gives them a bad haircut?

Of course Mayberry is only a mythical place in the heart, a dream, a fantasy, a place that probably never existed, at least not in this world. The reality of Mayberry would probably be more like this....

Otis would have been a drunk because his family left him due to the fact that he beat his wife, couldn't hold a job, and he had a thing for young boys. Opie would have abandonment issues over not knowing who his mother was or why she wasn't there. He would learn of her later in life when he found an old letter in his Dad's closet she had written to Andy, who was overseas fighting in Korea, and explained that she had gotten pregnant when they were together on his recent furlough, but soon after Andy went back to Korea she had met and fallen in love with Gus, a traveling encyclopedia salesman, and they would be running away together to start a new life in Richmond and as soon as the baby was born she would bring it back and give it to his Aunt Bee for safe keeping until Andy returned from the war except the part she left out was that the baby really wasn't Andy's, it was Gus's, they just didn't want it and she knew how gullible Andy was. Aunt Bee would have worked part time for the only appliance dealer in town as a book keeper where she was secretly embezzling about $75 a month which explains those well kept fancy hairdo's. Barney would have had a rented room over Floyd's garage where he had a clear shot into Clara's (Aunt Bee's best friend) bedroom next door where he would pleasure himself in the evenings as he watched Clara getting ready for bed. And Andy would drive into Mount Pilot every Friday night, supposedly on official business, where he was having an affair with Thelma Lou's sister Doris, who he met at bingo last year, who was married to the high school principal but justified her time with Andy because her husband Bob would rather dance around the house in her underwear to the music of Lawrence Welk, than have sex with her....or something like that.

But still, on days like today, with the smoke starting to lift, as I look out my window and notice the trees dancing lazily to the soft summer breeze that ripples thru the Maple's and watch the dragon flies doing loopedy loops over my back yard, I find my mind drifting to the mythical town of Mayberry. I don't think I'll ever find Mayberry in this life. Maybe Heaven is Mayberry. Maybe Mayberry is just a state of mind. I know one thing though, if I ever get to Mayberry, the first thing I'm going to do is to play guitars with Andy on his front porch on a warm summer evening while the crickets are chirping, the frogs are croaking, and the fire flies are jetting around the front yard. Afterwards we'll take a short walk into town for a bottle of cold pop as we discuss how much money Chester must have spent on that new chrome handled shovel he bought last week at Harold's Hardware And Dry Goods. Then I'm going to warn Clara about Barney, tell Opie the truth about his mother and Gus, turn Aunt Bee in to the Feds, and beat the crap out of Otis!