Andy of Mayberry, compulsive liar

Andy Taylor is a liar. Seriously. I’ve been watching episodes of the show evenings this winter, from its early black-and-white days featuring Barney Fife to its four-color evolution with prominent roles for a cast of small-town characters: the frumpy, fastidious worrywart Aunt Bea, the earnest, fastidious accountant Howard Sprague, the fastidious school teacher Helen Crump (Andy’s bland girlfriend), and two goofballs: Floyd the barber, and Goober. Andy is a constant, of course, as is his son, Opie.

Several of these characters can be annoying or uncomfortable to watch at times, especially Aunt Bea, Goober and Helen Crump. Aunt Bea can’t relax, and Goober is so stupid at times it is painful rather than funny. And Helen—what writer came up with the name of “Crump?” What stylist that butch haircut? She brings little to the table other than a bland pleasantness. Her “romance” with Andy is tepid, she’s neither beautiful nor funny; most of the time she seems no more important to the story than a piece of furniture. When she is featured on occasion, it is usually to be petty, jealous or untrusting of Andy.

With good reason. Almost every episode revolves around some deceit by that man—the sheriff, no less! He is always lying: to Helen, about that blonde attorney he spent the day with in Mount Pilot, or his old high school flame (the two of them couldn’t sleep and met up in the woods in the middle of the night, but of course it was all on the up-and-up). They make up at the end of the episodes, but the stories pivot on Andy’s conviction that Helen will be unable to handle the truth.

Andy lies to Aunt Bea about Opie visiting the sheriff’s office after school, against her wishes, or about who is doing the cooking and cleaning when Aunt Bea makes one of her rare trips out of town. These are presented as harmless, even humorous “white lies,” as acceptable ways to avoid conflict.

Andy manipulates his friends to get them to overcome their petty grievances, getting Aunt Bea and her friend Clara to make up after an acrimonious vacation to Mexico, or tricking Barney or Goober, Floyd and Howard by pretending to take the side of the bad guys (a developer who wants to evict a family, a barbershop franchise that briefly takes over Floyd’s homey shop) to get his desired outcome. The businessman castigates Andy for being cruel and reverses his position, allowing the family to stay; landlord Howard and tenant Floyd agree to split a proposed rent increase so Floyd can remain on Main Street, angrily chiding Andy for failing to see the role of the shop as a community meeting place. Andy takes the heat and smirks when they look away, his secret preserved.

The themes of lying and deception dominate. Barney is terrified of a criminal on the loose and through a series of slapstick moves manages to apprehend him, and Andy conspires to make it look like Barney was a brave hero, so as not to wound his ego. The town is filled with simpletons, er, simple folk. When people complain that Barney is acting too officious, a straight-faced Andy starts telling everyone that he’s going to fire Barney and bring in a replacement, and hearing this the townspeople rally to Barney’s defense. Aunt Bea fools one potential suitor (a clergyman, no less!) by wearing a wig, and pretends to be a “swinger” to turn away another.

These lies are presented as incidental to stories that on the surface appear to be about people’s good hearts and pure intentions, about a close-knit community where everyone pulls together. But even when the virtue of honesty is the theme of an episode—like the one in which Opie breaks a bottle of perfume at the drugstore where he works, and pays a fortune to replace it rather than own up—the moral is undermined by the show’s compulsive lying. The resolution of this supposedly clear-cut tale is compromised when, to make Opie feel better, the store’s owner breaks a bottle of perfume deliberately when Opie is not looking. One lie begets another, but all in a good cause.

No one talks to each other in this supposedly warm portrayal of small-town America. People routinely are dishonest, and Andy is unwilling to treat his friends or family as equals, condescending to them, treating them like children. The town father as sheriff knows best. But his benevolent hand requires constant deception, and he pays an unacknowledged price. For all the laughs and despite appearances, Andy leads an emotionally empty life—there is no one worthy of his respect, no one his equal.

This originally appeared in the 2004 Margie: The American Journal of Poetry:

Fathers In Black-And-White

I was raised in black-and-white.

My father often worked,

seldom spoke, but furnished me with a TV.

Dick Van Dyke

What an athlete.

See him tumble and get right back up—

in suit and tie!

Handsome as a geek, proof that goofballs

can get great jobs and a beautiful wife.

Perry Mason

Raymond Burr.

One’s an actor. One’s a lawyer,

carrying justice on his broad shoulders.

People murder to cover themselves.

People murder for love.

People murder over family wealth.

It doesn’t matter.

Perry unmasks them with his dagger eyes, his tidal voice,

always taking the exact same time.

My father always worked,

never spoke, but provided me their teachings.

Ward Cleaver

Thinks like a cleaver. Acts like a cleaver.

Cleaves his sons. Cleaves his wife.

Ward seems like an easy-going guy.

Just don’t get on his bad side.

Andy of Mayberry

Bit of a hayseed, but always does the right thing,

even when it’s hard, saving Barney Fife from his stupidity,

answering when his bird of a boy shrieks, “Pa!” Pa!”

He doesn’t like locking anyone up

in his harmless birdcage,

but will if he has to.

That’s his job. That’s the law.

My father sometimes watched with me,

but let them do his talking.

Getting the mail

I’ve sent and received dozens of emails and Facebook messages in the past week, but no written communications have been more satisfying than a four-page, handwritten letter and a homemade card and note I received in my mailbox.

They were terribly inefficient. The letter came from a Southern state, the card from the Midwest, and they were sorted, driven and flown to my local post office by numerous, anonymous people. A letter carrier in a fossil fuel-powered mail truck delivered them to the metal mailbox at the end of my driveway. From there, they were carried to the house and dropped in a wicker basket by the door, which is where I found them when I arrived home. The process from beginning to end took days. I cannot defend this long and sloppy chain of events on ecological or capitalist grounds, and the speed was turtle-like compared to the cyber alternatives, or even the telephone.

But they were such gifts. There among the bills and junk mail was something real, intended just for me, particular in its look and feel: hard-earned news from a friend. The frequency and ease of e-communications is astonishing, but their speed and scope diminish the importance of individual messages compared to hand-written pieces (or “missals,” as the late Jim Bledsoe used to call long, handwritten letters).

Cyber news is short and sweet, and often grammatically incorrect or filled with misspellings. We may choose to save these messages, but they are ephemeral, quickly obsolete. There is usually nothing to distinguish them but the moment. They all look the same, and exist in one dimension. (And let’s not forget that, like the posted letter, the delivery infrastructure of cyberspace is also hidden from us, and requires both people and energy.)

A handwritten communication is unique, with an intended audience of just one (or at most a few, a household). A mailed piece requires considerable thought and work on the part of the sender, from setting aside the time to write, organizing one’s thoughts prior to putting pen to paper (so as not to have to rewrite), addressing and stamping an envelope, then taking it to a mailbox for posting. Add the work involved in making a card, and the letter or note symbolizes a gift unrecognizable online: the gift of time. Someone is actually thinking about me—warm thoughts—and they want me to know something about their experience and what they are thinking.

The letter takes time to read, too. Its font is unique, not just to the author but to his or her emotional state, even to the choice of pen or other writing implement. The paper, the envelope, and the stamp on the envelope are distinctive (stamps are an underappreciated, miniature art genre). The handwritten letter or card arrives infrequently—it is impossible to replicate the speed of the keyboard and communicate with many people simultaneously—adding to its unique value. It is special, uncommon, to receive a letter by surface mail (now there’s a term worth unpacking!).

Like most everyone these days, I do most of my writing online, including this blog and word processing some of the snail-mail letters I write and post. But this week brought two treasured reminders in my mailbox that the time invested in sending cards and letters is always worth my effort, and handwriting should always be a part of my communications repertoire.

Systems and stories

There are limits to the appeal of miniaturization. While the trend toward smaller and smaller audio and video recording and playing devices continues, there is still something to be said for the grand gesture, the big screen. As much of the appeal of the new technology is sensory, we will always be drawn to large imagery as well as small.

Our communications tools and devices continue to dazzle. The new pocket video cameras, to cite just one example, are amazing for their ease of use and clarity of image, and they are inexpensive. It is unnecessarily convenient to call up a Van Gogh or a movie in your hand on an iPhone or Blackberry, but it means we are never alone, never apart from a vast and growing encyclopedia. The weather, the sports score, the breaking news, directions, games, and, of course, a network of friends and colleagues, can be available to us anytime, anywhere.

Every new piece of hardware can accommodate more and more applications, whether we need them or not. The delivery systems already in place are breathtaking, and more are on the way. The world flows our way: we barely have to stir from our cars or living rooms.

But we still need to learn how best to use these new devices, and to develop content as rich and sophisticated as the technology that delivers it. It is true that we often cannot conceive of the uses of new tools until we begin using them. But after the initial magic wears off, we still must confront the fact that we exist in real time on a real planet divided into 24-hour days. We still must live meaningful lives filled with activities to justify all of this hardware, unless we become resigned to being passive consumers of a small, elite culture of people who value experience, action and expression over passive consumption. The computer is made by and for real flesh-and-blood people, who may or may not have something to say.

The new iPad is the latest example of technology outracing, and attempting to redefine, need. The early reviews expressed disappointment that the iPad is not more spectacular; people close to these developments wanted to be wowed by it, presented with something they had not yet imagined on their own, that had the power to transform lives. The debate continues, even before the iPad becomes available to the masses, as some maintain that it will, in fact, be revolutionary in its impact.

The larger point is that we didn’t necessarily need or want it. It may bring something new and useful to the table, it may shepherd in a new era of cyber-traffic, it may successfully impart new rules for creating and disseminating content. But it will still depend, as all technologies depend, on the people who animate it, and they in turn must eat, sleep, deal with global warming and a war in Afghanistan, be happy or disappointed, fall in love.

Without the atomic, cellular world, we will have no stories to tell each other in cyberspace.

Valentine's Day

Love Poem

“Come with me,” you said,

warming my hands with your breath,

“and bring your bag of bones.”

With that, we scrambled up the stone-dry banks

of the glacial lake that once filled this raging valley,

mountain goats or pack mules on our path to discovery.

Guided by wildflower flares, mauve, then gold,

on a wilderness of leaves, one by one we rubbed our dull bones

before returning them to the soil.

Your eyes a wildflower, jade, then blue,

through a steady rain of words and protozoa,

birch ridge on tiptoe, whispering to hemlock, moss, echoing woodpecker.

Your thoughtful gaze and yielding skin

warmed away the hours, blanketing the cold

and bringing us back to the sweet realization

that we had returned to the place where we began.

Time for literature

What are you reading? With all the books in the world that I would like to read one day, I still go through stretches where I am not actively reading any book. This is one of them. By my bedside I have The Brothers K by David James Duncan, which I have already read before, and which I am now reading aloud, slowly, with my partner, a few pages a night on those nights when we choose it over music or a crossword puzzle; Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters, by Robert Beverly Hale, which I love but read sporadically, a little at a time; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami, a memoir, half read for weeks now; and a few volumes of poetry. Most nights lately they sit unopened as she and I work on the Sunday New York Times or Boston Globe crossword puzzles.

I'm not sure why. This is, after all, midwinter, which is usually the ideal time to hunker down with a good book. It is not about opportunity: yesterday I had the entire day before me to do what I liked, and I did not chose to pick up a book. I cooked and did laundry, took a long walk with the dog, watched a movie, Out of Africa, on television, followed by the Super Bowl. It was a literary movie, and I loved it, just as I enjoyed The English Patient on film the night before. I had not seen either one of them before. Both movies were captivating, and it was easy to absorb them in visual terms, in only a few hours. But their basis was print: they required a memoir and a novel and written scripts to be realized on film.

The last book I read was a biography of John Cale, last month, during a trip to the Midwest (in it, John is described as a voracious reader, reading more than 500 books a year, on nearly any topic. He does not collect books, though, instead donating them annually to the New School). The last novel I read? The Tie That Binds, by Kent Haruf, but that was also read aloud. Before that, quietly, on my own? I cannot remember. The Comedians by Graham Greene, I think.

Though none of his novels made my deserted island list, Greene is one of my favorite authors, and I have have several of his sitting on my shelves, unread. Perhaps he can jump-start the process. (The 1950s Haiti Greene describes in The Comedians, by the way, is remarkably like the culture of corruption and instability I experienced there in the late 1990s, and makes me doubtful that the country can recreate itself in the aftermath of the January 12 earthquake, the latest in a series of human and natural disasters ranging from Papa Doc to Baby Doc to the massive, destructive 2008 floods. But that's another story).

It's not that I don't read. I thumb through at least two newspapers a day, and subscribe to several periodicals. I almost always read something from The New Yorker, which remains my favorite magazine, and I thoroughly enjoy many of its long feature stories. I read things online daily as well, although it is a kind of USA Today-style reading: short bits, amply illustrated.

I'm always picking up something to read, always looking up something. I write for a living, after all, and am a champion of the printed word. But like many of the other things we value or love to do, such as painting or exercise, reading literature is a discipline, a habit, and it is missing from my life just now.

Top 5 books

Years ago several of us were sitting around a small fire in the backyard on a fall evening, listing the five books each of us would take if we were forced to live on a deserted island for the rest of our lives. I only remember two responses. The first was from Jim Bledsoe, an older, gay man visiting from New York, who named The Complete Works of Jane Austen. I think we were startled by his choice, not knowing that Jim was a Jane fan, or maybe because we thought he was stretching the rules a bit (could you pick the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, for example, or any author? hmmm ...).

The other choice which generated some surprise among the group was my choice of the dictionary. But I loved then, and love now, to look up words, and can be endlessly entertained by thumbing through the dictionary. I find that I regularly consult the dictionary in my work (mostly online now, Merriam-Webster), looking up words that I think I know to get their precise meaning before I commit them to writing, whether in a poem or essay. I know the general meaning of a lot of words, but sometimes a subtle shift in meaning can send readers off in a totally different direction from the one I intended. So I look the word up, and learn not just its meaning but its roots in the process.

It was in this spirit that I went and looked up "Luddite" after I used it in yesterday's post. Anecdotally, I knew it to mean someone who resists technology. That is true, but here is the rest of what I found:

Main Entry: Ludd·ite

Pronunciation: \ˈlə-ˌdīt\

Function: noun

Etymology: perhaps from Ned Ludd, 18th century Leicestershire workman who destroyed a knitting frame

Date: 1811

: one of a group of early 19th century English workmen destroying laborsaving machinery as a protest; broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change

In just a few short lines I am given not only the meaning of the word but the name of a real person, where and when he lived, and what he did that, apparently, gave rise to the word we use today. I love it! The dictionary remains on my Top 5 list today. The others:

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (only kidding)

The Four Adventures of Richard Hannay, by John Buchan

Collected Poems, Stanley Kunitz

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Paradise Lost, John Milton

On reflection, this is an impossible task. If I am being whisked out the door and have to grab five volumes, these would be good choices, but so would many others, especially bound collections like The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and, yes, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Novels are an especially tough choice, as there are so many good ones, and it's hard to know which ones would sustain my interest the most over many readings. But I think I could live with these comfortably for some time.

Your five??

Embracing communications technology

I'm no Luddite, yet 18 months ago I did not even own a cell phone, much less a Blackberry, I had a barely active Facebook account, and was not LinkedIn. I was only beginning to use a digital camera. More and more of my professional work centered around website development and I used email and the Internet regularly, but I resisted the onslaught of new communications technologies. I resented the culture of obsolescence which not only valued new technologies over old ones, but seemed determined to replace other means of communication, rather than add to them.

I continue to believe that there is value in keeping an array of communication tools in our repertoire. The physical act of handwriting, for example, compels us to organize our thoughts in ways not required by composing on the computer, and the end product is unique to us, communicating something timeless about us as well as providing insight about our emotional state at the time of writing. I would even like to buy a typewriter for its smells, its bells, its manifest mechanics!

So I embrace the new technologies as additions, not replacements, for all that came before them (knowing that they, too, will become obsolete in a matter of years, if not months). The creation of this blog and a flip camcorder arrived in my house in the same day, and both promise to expand my possibilities for dynamic communication exponentially. It is an exciting time, and bound to become more exciting.

Still, nothing beats sitting down with you in real time, face to face.