Saturday, June 16, 2007

98: jumping up and down, jumping up and down!

guess what i saw on the road friday afternoon y'all?

i saw an old car up on a trailer, being driven along the highway. i could see that it was a police car but it looked like an OLD police car and that was what caught my eye. i did a double take with that same eye (the other was on the road y'all; i'm a good driver!) and saw that it read "Mayberry Sheriff" on the side.

i almost peed my pants.

we all know who "Mayberry Sheriff" is right?!

it's none other than Sheriff Andy Taylor, lil Opie's paw and ole Aint Bee's nephew.

just so happens that "The Andy Griffith Show" was one of my favorites t.v. shows when i was a little girl. and despite the fact that i never saw one lil girl who looked like me on that show, i wanted to live in Mayberry.

maybe it's cuz i thought andy was so nice and handsome and i wanted a daddy just like him. or was it cuz mayberry was as different and as far from tha hood as i thought i could get, back then? maybe it was cuz aint bee always seemed to be cooking something deee-lish-us for andy and opie, the kinda food my momma would never cook cuz she just wasn't that type of momma.

i can't zactly recall why i thought mayberry was the place to be... but if i close my eyes and think really really hard, i think a huge part of it was wanting to experience small town living cuz the place i grew up sometimes felt too darned big for me.

today "the andy griffith show" remains one of my favorites. for me, there's not too much funnier (clean humor) than them ole folks in mayberry when they get to carryin' on.

so back to the highway...

now, my daughter thought i was all riled up about much of nothing (even tho she knows how much i love me some sheriff andy taylor.) my grandma said she was sure mayberry had more than one sheriff car. (cuz she thought mayberry was a real place. but maybe she's right any way. maybe there were several cars, just in case. or maybe several or dozens of fans have decked out their own "sheriff car" in tribute.)

i don't care and it don't matter to me what they thought or what might be some other truth(s) about the car(s).

what matters is what i know to be real. i know i really saw a car painted to look just like the car andy taylor drives as mayberry sheriff. i also know that where we live is close enough to andy griffith's hometown--where there is a whole tourist industry built around "the andy griffith show", including the Mayberry Days festival that features a trip around "mayberry" in a 1962 squad car replica--for that to have been an official "mayberry sheriff" vehicle.

either way, seeing that car was one of the highlights of my day. i also took it as a personal wink from God to me, a way of letting me know i'm doing the right thing.

which thing, i'm not sure...

.

1 comment:

bobbi said...

I'm with ya, sound like it would of made my day also.