MAKE AMERICA MAYBERRY AGAIN (MAMA)

     

     

     I was raised in a dysfunctional home.  Maybe, all of us were to some degree.  My home was filled with tension, harsh words, anger, threats, fear and physical punishment.  I felt perpetually unwelcome.  I would often lose myself in dreams of a better place.  A friendly, welcoming place where words produced laughter not pain.  To this end, I never missed a rerun of the Andy Griffith show during my childhood years.  Mayberry became my happy place.  Mayberry represented family and a better existence, a better America.  Baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet.  A cold coke on the porch as the autumn breeze brought another pleasant day to an end.  Maybe Uncle Andy would break out the guitar and we would sing a few tunes. No matter the events of the day it would end with a kiss on the forehead as Andy turned the bedside lamp out.  The town would rest easy, doors unlocked and windows open.  I dreamed of a weekend car trip in the police cruiser to Mount Pilot to watch Aunt Bee compete in the County Bake Off or to watch the new picture show.  Mayberry was grassroots America. 

     To this day I find it difficult to resist an Andy Griffith episode.  I haven’t spoken to my family in over a decade but when Andy starts whistling I’m gonna have to sit a spell… for old times sake. Mayberry hasn’t changed a bit.  Everything is the same.  The only thing which has changed…. ME.  Fifty plus years on this Earth can open one’s eyes to things a child could not and did not see.  Some of us may remain a child inside.  Our youthful enthusiasm may persist but we have grown emotionally, intellectually and spiritually.  We have evolved.   While others have not… some continue to see Mayberry as the idyllic setting.  The America which was great… the America we want to bring back again.  But the Mayberry I see as an adult is vastly different than the Mayberry I saw as a child.  Do you see what I see?

     Opie was a well-mannered, precocious child… raised in a broken home.  Opie did not have both parents.  His family was absent a mother.  Andy was a widow.

     No one ever mentioned how Andy’s wife died.  No one ever mentioned where Andy’s girlfriend from the first year disappeared too?  She just stopped working at the pharmacy.  Maybe they are both buried in shallow graves somewhere in Mount Pilot?  Maybe it’s why Andy didn’t carry a gun?  He was deadly with a shovel!

     Aunt Bee had a “friend” named Clara.  They spent their time turning cucumbers into pickles.  Need I say more? 

     Gomer and Goober were both special needs individuals with idiot-savant mechanical abilities.  Gomer was the smart one.  He scored just low enough to qualify for the Marines.  He wasn’t that bright but, golly, he was smart enough to kill yellow people when Sargent Carter ordered him too.

     Otis suffered from alcoholism.  What did his friends do?  Enable him.  They did not have an intervention.  They did not send him for treatment.  They allowed him to “sleep it off” weekend after weekend as his internal organs shut down and his mental abilities diminished.

     Opie was bullied at school.  Why?  Because he didn’t have a mother?  Because he was ginger?  Because his father was having sexual relations with that woman, Opie’s teacher, Ms. Crump?  Because his father was a potential serial killer?  No one knows for sure… but we do know Andy and Barney encouraged Opie to fight his bully.  Evidently violence was a solution in Mayberry.  These violent tendencies would result in Andy sending Opie to live in Milwaukee with Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham.  The records have been sealed but one can only imagine the tragedy which would require relocation and a name change.

     Barney was a hot head with a badge.  Quick to lose his temper and pull his gun.  Low on self-esteem and self-worth.  A powder keg waiting to explode on any foreigner or colored who might pass through town with a broken taillight.  And what happened to Barn’s first girlfriend from the local diner, Juanita Beasley?  Illegal?  Deported by ICE because she wouldn’t bend to Barney’s aggressive sexual desires?  Or was she a fatality in the Mayberry Moonshine epidemic?

     Ernest T. Bass clearly suffered from numerous undiagnosed learning and emotional issues.  Evidently an ADHD child who refused to take his medication and learn appropriate social skills.  He was a stalker and a sexual predator.  He had no respect for women or the law as evidenced in his pursuit of a betrothed Charlene Darling.  No doubt he would have shot up a school… if he had attended school.  Ernest T. Bass was the closest the town came to an African-American resident.  Ernest loved to rhyme/rap, was constantly being pursued by the Sheriff and was saving for a gold tooth.

     Floyd the Barber…. gay.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

     Sweet, innocent Mayberry.  Turns out it was never that sweet or innocent.  It was I who was sweet and innocent.  I was inexperienced in the ways of the world.  Naïve to the issues which were clearly present just below the calm, happy, shiny surface.  As I matured the truth was readily evident.  And I did what many do not do…. I accepted it.  I changed my beliefs.  I changed my feelings.

     America was never like Mayberry.  As Sheriff Taylor and Deputy Fife discussed their fishin’ hole trophies, American boys invaded an Asian nation and took the lives of innocent civilians in the Vietnam War which was intentionally prolonged to allow Nixon to take office at the cost of more young lives on both sides.  As Otis battled another hangover in his finely adorned jail cell, young black men, women and children faced the fire hoses and German Shepherds of Bombingham’s Bull Connor.  They were denied admission at the University of Alabama as the Governor blocked the doorway.  Civil Rights workers were buried in a Mississippi earthen dam because they had the audacity to try and vote.  Women were forced into back alley abortions and we watched JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X fall to assassin’s bullets.  Mayberry was a figment of an innocent, young boy’s imagination.   A friendly, loving, white place which crime or reality never visited.  No problem was so big it couldn’t be solved in thirty minutes with a slice of Aunt Bee’s award-winning apple pie.

     Some of us grew up to be adults.  We accepted the world with it’s joys and pitfalls.  With it’s good and evil.  Some of us pretend Mayberry really existed.  We try and rebuild a place that was never built.  We long for a day that never was and never will be.  We live in a fantasy world with our eyes shut to the obvious.  We live like a child with ignorant beliefs… all the while pretending to be adults.

     Before we leave the neatly-trimmed yards and spartan streets of Mayberry, we should mention one last aspect of the once (imagined) and great America.  Some Mayberry citizens had a single shot rifle.  Only one citizen had a revolver.  And that citizen, Barney, only had one bullet.  Because in our fantasies…. we inherently know… a semi/automatic weapon does not belong … in our happy place.