The American Revolution according to Andy Griffith. It might be just a tiny bit lopsided, but it’s as American as apple pie. HAPPY 4TH OF JULY TO ALL MY U. S. FRIENDS!
^^^
Andy Griffith
Andy Griffith Christmas Episode
Sit back and forget about the rest of the world for 30 minutes. Take a little trip to Mayberry, USA, and get a whole new lease on life.
~~~
I Recommend “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” Series
I seldom post reviews of books that I am reading – not because I do not think they are worthy of a post – but mostly because I am always reading and enjoy so many different genres by so many different authors that if I let myself do so, I would be posting about them all the time, rather than about other things. However, occasionally, I find myself enjoying a book so very much that I am just compelled to share it – or to share a series that is special to me.
I have posted a time or two about the Miss Read books – authored by the late Dora Saint – and I talked about how those books take the reader right into villages, the homes, and the lives of the charming and endearing characters. I became a bona-fide citizen of the fictional villages of Thrush Green and Fairacre through living in the books of the two series by those names.
More recently – and currently – I find myself in Botswana – deeply and cheerfully involved in the lives of one Precious Ramotswe and Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, as well as all the other colorful people who populate their lives. I met Precious and Mr. J. L. B in Alexander McCall Smith’s book, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. That particular book eventually became a series of 15 books (as of the date of my post). The original book has been made into a movie, and the BBC eventually picked up at least some of the series for TV production.
The series shares the life of Mma Precious Ramotswe, who, after losing her father and inheriting all of his cattle, sells the cattle to get money enough to open a private detective agency. Precious has always been gifted with the ability to figure out mysteries and to find people and things, and after acquiring some education in the subject and earning a certificate, she sets out to open her business. From that point on, the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency provides the backdrop for all the colorful, lovable, entertaining people and events that carry the reader from one book to another.
I will have to admit that when I first picked up book #1 and started reading, the African names and idiomatic expressions seemed to make reading difficult. As interesting as the story sounded, I thought perhaps it would just not be worth trying to figure out all the correct pronunciations enough to make the reading flow smoothly. However, I discovered the movie online and watched it. That experience brought the language to life for me – and allowed me to grasp the unique beauty in the lyrical, almost musical, rhythm of it. (There are audio versions of the books that will do that as well.) Once I had heard the language spoken, I found it totally delightful. From that point on, I was able to pick up the books again and read with no difficulty.
I think it might be of interest to future readers of the series to note that the books have become so popular around the world that there are sites online devoted to explaining the pronunciation of the names and words used, as well as some of the social protocol that influences the way people speak to and interact with one another.
One of the most obvious and affecting things that I noticed concerning the characters, who are very real and true to life – according to all the research I have done – is that the people of Botswana think of each other and speak to each other with enormous respect. Showing respect seems to affect every part of how they speak and interact with each other and with strangers, and I can’t help but compare that to the way so many of the people of the United States speak to and treat each other. We could learn some lessons.
But, overall, the beauty of the series is that the characters do live their lives in a very realistic way – loving, caring, sharing joys and sorrows – and although the stories revolve around some degree of mystery and investigation (it is about a ladies’ detective agency after all), the whole thrust of the books is positive and life-affirming on every level. The basic, everyday wisdom that Precious and her family and friends share in thought and in dialogue help the reader see life situations at ground level – in a way that strips away all the pretense and prejudice and just lets honesty shine through. Readers often find themselves thinking: “That’s just exactly how I feel about that situation, and she has put it into perfect words.” And readers feel a sense of hope and well-being as they move through these stories and when they close each book at the end of its final chapter.
I can’t help but compare the series – as I have the Miss Read series – to the long-running American television series The Andy Griffith Show. That show has broken all kinds of records as a result of running successfully for so many years – first in its original sit-com schedule and then through decades of re-runs right up to the present day. It’s still one of the best-loved TV series that ever existed, and it’s because it tells the story of a hometown full of real-life, imperfect, but lovable people who spend their lives sharing the good and the bad with their family and friends, always focusing each other on what is wholesome and valuable in life.
Yes, I know there are thousands of readers out there who “say” they want what they call “realism,” but who mean they want to read books and see movies that focus on the ugly, the destructive, the deadly, the evil in this life. But during my 66 years on this earth, I’ve experienced just about all the good and bad that this life has to offer – both in people and in situations – and I can tell you that the vast majority of people who pick up a book or sit down to a movie – if they are honest – are hoping to find a little bit of a reminder that there really is something a little better than the bad they’ve experienced so far. They’re hoping that they will get a glimpse of a possible level of life that is just a little higher, a little finer, a little happier than what they see in the norm. They want to see heroes – men and women who have that special “something” that makes them just a little bit more noble, more loving, and more victorious than the mediocre that surrounds the average person 24/7.
I’ve always been aware that, as a writer, I have a choice to make: I can take people down to the lowest levels of life, where there dwells no happiness and no hope. Or I can take them up – by getting them to look up – to the highest levels of life and the possibilities of making the world a better place through how we live and love. That’s why I choose to write about heroes and heroines who are just a tiny bit larger than life because they are focused on what is good and true and lovely – and, yes – available – if we will but make up our minds to have it. I see that component coming through strongly in the books that I have read (so far) in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. That’s why I can’t seem to stop reading until I get to the last book – and I’m hoping that by then, Mr. Alexander McCall Smith will have written more.
In book # 9 of the series, The Miracle at Speedy Motors, Precious Ramotswe tells her adopted son, “We are all the same. All the same people. Bushmen, San, whatever you want to call them, and us, Batswana. White people too. Everybody. Inside us, we are exactly the same.” (Alexander McCall Smith, The Miracle at Speedy Motors, Pantheon Books, p. 35). That’s one of the main assurances the reader takes from this series. Inside us, we are all the same. That’s why it’s so easy to fall in love with the people of Botswana. Whether the reader even knows enough geography to point to the country on the map or not, he feels a kinship with its people – and thereby with all the peoples of the world – as he lives in these books.
~~~
~~~
Love -Through the Eyes of Opie Taylor
In an episode of the uniquely popular TV program The Andy Griffith Show, an episode entitled “The Rivals,” Andy tries to help his son Opie come to terms with the troubling symptoms of being in the throes of first love. As they sit together in the living room, Opie opens the conversation:
“Pa, when you like someone a whole lot, that means you love ’em, don’t it?”
“It depends,” says Andy.
“Well, when I’m with Karen, I get a lump in my throat, my ears ring, and my knees get all squiggly. Does that mean I’m in love?’
“Either that or you’ve got a real bad case of the measles.”
“Pa, if I marry Karen someday, her name becomes Taylor, don’t it?”
“That’s right, and all your children become Taylors too.”
“Children? … I don’t think we’d have any children, Pa. We already know enough kids to play with.”
And so – with childhood’s blurry vision of the details of this state called marriage — Opie easily dismisses one of the most important results of engaging in the deepest mysteries of the marriage covenant. Children are a very visible product of those mysteries.
But there are other products as well. Many of them are not so easily seen or identified, but they can be just as important and just as life-changing. There is a sense of fulfillment and a greater sense of wholeness. There’s a sense of security and oneness that melts away all the coldness of being alone. And there’s a new knowledge of self – an understanding of oneself on a new level. The man and woman who have previously been “their own person” have now, for the first time, realized that they are much more complex and much more capable of enjoying that complexity as a result of this new relationship and the new identity that results from it.
But all of this change is not easy. Nor is it simple. In fact, it is so complex that sometimes it’s weeks, or unfortunately even years, before one or both partners actually realize that they have become a part of a brand new whole and are no longer exactly the same persons they were before marriage.
That realization could be frightening if not seen through the plan of God. He, after all, is Love (1 John 4:8). He created this thing called marriage – and the sex that is an integral part of it. And guess what? He knows what He’s talking about. His plan is that each partner in this holy covenant relationship will find in the mate the answer to longings that have never been fulfilled; the key to opening doors in the soul that have never been unlocked; and the love that saturates and nurtures our unique gifts and abilities so that they mature and bring us to the highest and best we can be. In short, it’s this new person, conceived from the two, that is finally complete and whole in a way that nothing but a “covenant” marriage relationship can accomplish.
It is true that our mate cannot fill the place in us that is reserved for God Himself. And we will never be truly whole until He is at home in us. But it is God Himself who has told us clearly, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. … And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ … For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” (Gen. 2: 18, 22-24, NAS).
So God said of his “perfect” man that he needed a woman to be complete. And He created the woman to be so much a part of the man that she would have a need of him to be complete as well. Isn’t it interesting that this “need” of each other was created into us as part of our perfection? And this unique completeness that results is probably the one most powerful and thrilling product of a man and woman entering into and enjoying the blessed mysteries of God’s kind of marriage.
I know in this 21st century – especially in the hollowed political halls of this world — it is not considered “politically correct” to make such statements. But, thank God, there is still one Document that supersedes all the political attitudes and postures of every society on the face of the earth. It still supersedes every new “law” on the books that would try to make marriage something different from what God created it to be. What a blessing to know that He still holds the patent on marriage. And that one Document — The Word of God – The Holy Bible – still gives the human race the blessed, supernatural opportunity to experience total completeness through love – when they enter into it the way God Himself created it to be experienced.
Truly, a Valentine gift to be treasured forever.
~
Love – Through the Eyes of Opie Taylor
In an episode of the uniquely popular TV program The Andy Griffith Show, an episode entitled “The Rivals,” Andy tries to help his son Opie come to terms with the troubling symptoms of being in the throes of first love. As they sit together in the living room, Opie opens the conversation: “Paw, when you like someone a whole lot, that means you love ’em, don’t it?”
“It depends,” says Andy.
“Well, when I’m with Karen, I get a lump in my throat, my ears ring, and my knees get all squiggly. Does that mean I’m in love?’
“Either that or you’ve got a real bad case of the measles.”
“Paw, if I marry Karen someday, her name becomes Taylor, don’t it?”
“That’s right, and all your children become Taylors too.”
“Children? … I don’t think we’d have any children, Paw. We already know enough kids to play with.”
And so – with childhood’s blurry vision of the details of this state called marriage — Opie easily dismisses one of the most important results of engaging in the deepest mysteries of the marriage covenant. Children are a very visible product of those mysteries.
But there are other products as well. Many of them are not so easily seen or identified, but they can be just as important and just as life-changing. There is a sense of fulfillment and a greater sense of wholeness. There’s a sense of security and oneness that melts away all the coldness of being alone. And there’s a new knowledge of self – an understanding of oneself on a new level. The man and woman who have previously been “their own person” have now, for the first time, realized that they are much more complex and much more capable of enjoying that complexity as a result of this new relationship and the new identity that results from it.
But all of this change is not easy. Nor is it simple. In fact, it is so complex that sometimes it’s weeks, or unfortunately even years, before one or both partners actually realize that they have become a part of a brand new whole and are no longer exactly the same persons they were before marriage.
That realization could be frightening if not seen through the plan of God. He, after all, is Love (1 John 4:8). He created this thing called marriage – and the sex that is an integral part of it. And guess what? He knows what He’s talking about. His plan is that each partner in this holy covenant relationship will find in the mate the answer to longings that have never been fulfilled; the key to opening doors in the soul that have never been unlocked; and the love that saturates and nurtures our unique gifts and abilities so that they mature and bring us to the highest and best we can be. In short, it’s this new person, conceived from the two, that is finally complete and whole in a way that nothing but a “covenant” marriage relationship can accomplish.
It is true that our mate cannot fill the place in us that is reserved for God Himself. And we will never be truly whole until He is at home in us, giving us all of Himself. But it is God Himself who has told us clearly, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper suitable for him. … And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man and brought her to the man. And the man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ … For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.” (Gen. 2: 18, 22-24, NAS). God said of his “perfect” man that he needed a woman to be complete. And He created the woman to be so much a part of the man that she would have a need of him to be complete as well. Isn’t it interesting that this “need” of each other was created into us as part of our perfection? And this unique completeness that results is probably the one most powerful and thrilling product of a man and woman entering into and enjoying the blessed mysteries of God’s kind of marriage.
I know in this 21st century – especially in the hollowed political halls of this world — it is not considered “politically correct” to make such statements. But, thank God, there is still one Document that supersedes all the political attitudes and postures of every society on the face of the earth. It still supersedes every new “law” on the books that would try to make marriage something different from the commitment of one male and one female partner in covenant with each other and with the God who created them. Thank God that Document — The Word of God – The Holy Bible – still gives the human race the blessed, supernatural opportunity to experience total completeness through love – when they enter into it the way God Himself created it to be experienced.
Truly, a Valentine gift to be treasured forever.
A Visit With Sandra 