My Own Mayberry

Yesterday Andy Griffith passed away. His show, The Andy Griffith Show, painted an idyllic image of small-town America in the 60's, a time often heralded as "a simpler time." Lots of people sigh wistfully, wishing life were like it was in Mayberry. Even songs have been written about it... This one has been in my head since I heard the news about AG:

The deli across the street from my house

I happen to have grown up in a time and place that was probably as close to Mayberry as you could get, sans Andy Griffith. It was really, really small. In fact, it was so small we didn't even have our own sheriff. We had a post office, a general store, a deli, a bar, a gas station, a restaurant, a library, an Ag Way Store, a pizza place and laundry mat, and that is about it. Neighbors really knew each other, and us kids didn't get away with much, because all the parents knew all the kids, and all the parents talked to each other.

But we had oodles of small-town charm. It practically oozed down our stop-lightless streets. At no time was it more evident than on the 4th of July. It started with our parade, where the VFW, the volunteer fire dept. marched or drove old cars or fire trucks, and kids joined with their bikes decorated with streamers and crepe paper. Together they all headed to the town recreation center, known simply as The Rec.

 July 4th, 1987 at the Rec with my friend
Rebecca  Jayne

The Rec was a simple chlorinated stream-fed pondish-type thing, with a sandy patch on one side, and a wooden dock on the other for diving and jumping. When my mom was a kid visiting there in the summers from NY City, it was called "the swimming hole," and it didn't have the dock or the sand. In my day, ALL the kids in town hung out there. I don't remember a whole lot of people who actually had pools, so really, it was one of the few places to go swimming in the summer. I practically lived there in July and August. It was where I took swimming lessons, joined the swim team, took arts and crafts classes, had a crush on a life guard, earned my first stitches getting hit in the head with a swing. We built sand castles out of beach toys that my mom made out of empty milk jugs, laundry soap containers, and other plastic containers.

But on Independence Day, The Rec became a giant town party. In New York, schools don't let out until the last week of July, and Independence Day is the party that ushers in the official start of summer. Once the parade arrived, the festivities began. There was grilling and watermelon and sodas--a huge treat to us, since we didn't get soda at home. There were frog jumping contests, greased watermelon contests, egg tosses, three-legged races, a tug of war contest over the water, and horseshoe tournaments. All those bikes decorated for the parade entered a contest, too. When the sun went down,  people would gather in the field between the Little League diamond and the town Library, behind the Grange Hall and the Ag-Way Store. The adults would visit, while kids ran around waving sparklers and popping bang snaps on any hard surface to be found.



Suddenly, BOOM! The sky would explode in colorful sparks as the (all volunteer) fire department launched fireworks from the other side of The Rec pond. After we had all sufficiently oohed and ahhed, us kids went to bed, but the adults would dance the night away under the open-air pavilion while a local band played.

I've since celebrated 4th of July lots of different ways and places: in backyards lighting our own fireworks, big pool parties with hundreds of people, I've seen fireworks in Los Angeles and next to the Washington Monument in Washington D.C., and giant festivals with rides and games and fireworks with synchronized music, but nothing has ever compared to Independence Day in my own Mayberry.

That blue house on the left is the house I grew up in

Elvin's General Store