BRAVE NEUF WORLD: Living in Mayberry

My friend and I walked our dogs on a beautiful afternoon this week. The leaves are just starting to change in our neighborhood so it’s beginning to look like fall here in Oakwood, our little corner of Dayton, Ohio. As we passed the high school football field, the Oakwood Lumberjacks were practicing for the homecoming game. The band was rehearsing in another corner of the field. My friend and I had been remarking on what a truly lovely day it was. Then, her next comment seemed inspired by the quintessence of this American scene, "Yup. It’s like living in Mayberry!” I laughed. And I agreed, because Oakwood really is Mayberry-esque in a lot of ways, which of course is the fictitious town where the Andy Griffith Show took place from 1960-68.

My friend went on to tell me that she had once made the Oakwood/Mayberry analogy to a young niece whose response, “What’s Mayberry?” jolted my friend into one of those, “I guess you’re getting old when kids don’t know your TV references” moments. We agreed that it was a shame for any kid to have grown up without ever knowing Sheriff Andy Taylor, Aunt Bee, Opie, Barney Fife, Helen Crump, Thelma Lou, Howard Sprague, Gomer Pyle and his cousin Goober, or the show’s version of an ideal small American town. I mean, everyone should know about Deputy Barney Fife, the funniest law man EVER on TV.

Mind you, Mayberry wasn't perfect. Floyd the Barber was a big gossip, and let’s face it, Otis, the town souse, was loveable but nobody ever tried to get him into AA. Mayberry apparently didn’t have any diversity in the population, nor were there any rock and roll-loving youth anywhere in sight. Somehow Mayberry avoided most realities of the 1960s such as the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the Beatles, the rock revolution, hippies and the Summer of Love. Escapism can be soothing, I suppose.

Anyway, I got thinking about being a kid growing up in Canada, watching American television shows, as we did. A place like Mayberry was a far cry from my reality in the land of the wind chill factor. I became fascinated with small town America. I wanted to find that archetypal Main Street and those sweet houses with front porches and rocking chairs. From the time we moved to the US in 1999, we have driven country roads on Sunday excursions finding dozens of those towns here and there. They totally charm me. Maybe there are meth labs in the garages, but I love the Mayberry facades.

So to find ourselves in this amiable little suburb of Oakwood? My dreams have come true! And who wouldn’t want to live in a neighborhood where everyone says hello to everyone? Where big old trees hover above wide streets. And four squirrels per household scamper about. Where every Victorian, Craftsman and Neo-Colonial house has a front porch with the requisite wicker chairs, rockers or porch swings. Where downtown is one block long containing a city hall, the fire and police station and a handful of businesses. Who wouldn’t want to find a community where kids walk to and from school and some even go home for lunch? Where the scarecrows that community members put up annually along a major boulevard just before Halloween are never vandalized. And a neighborhood where, if you see a cop drive by, you wave and say, “Hey, Andy!”

Somehow in the fall, I think America is at its most American. Maybe it’s the straw bales and pumpkins on the porches. Maybe it’s the wiff of grilled burgers at the homecoming game or the marching band playing the fight song. Whatever it is, I find it enchanting. The Lumberjacks play tonight.

Go Mayberry….er, I mean, Go Oakwood!