Dale, the real thing, a woman who made time for a little boy who still plays the reruns in his head, would have liked that. Momma kept in touch with her good and sent Bibles in her memory when she passed away. She sent me a little book of devotionals once, self-written. I wrote her, maybe once or twice every five or so years, even after she became frail and then sort of wandered in her mind. ![]() All I know is she made you feel special because, as my mother has always testified, Mrs. I’m not sure what her big-picture options were. ![]() And she was a farm wife in a small town in the 1960s. You were home when you were with her, never worried about a thing. The house had a cool way of letting the breeze sort of mist through, maybe lightly stream through. The night before, knowing what was going to happen at breakfast made going to sleep harder than going to sleep on Christmas Eve. Bavier, lovingly known as Aunt Bee from the 1960’s hit TV sitcom, 'The Andy Griffith Show,' traded the fast pace city life of Los Angeles in 1972 to retire to peaceful Siler City. And I wanted to because she was always smiling with me, she’d work puzzles with me, she colored with me, she watched ballgames with me, and she had a screened-in porch where I could sleep at night, then wake up to sausage frying and she crumbled it up and put it in the scrambled eggs. She told momma who she was and said she’d keep us while momma was in the hospital having a surgery. Nearby, guests explore historic downtown. We had been in this little town for about two months when my mother, only 24 and far from her home in Louisiana, already with three children, answered a knock on our door. Located in Oakwood Cemetery in Siler City in Chatham County. I wonder if my “Aunt Bee” will remind you of yours. Dale, and she passed away in October this year, back home in Carolina. Not only have I had a black-and-white Aunt Bee, I’ve had a full-color, real-life Aunt Bee. So my favorite TV show continues to teach me valuable lessons it’s just taken me a while to recognize the latest one. Second thing: To add insult to injury, a couple decades ago it dawned on me that while I’d always wanted to grow up to be Andy, I’d nearly turned into Otis. You learn as you age that from Point A to Point Aunt Bee isn’t nearly as far as you’d thought. He’d have had the same chance in Dodge City as a breath mint has against an acre of onions.Īnyway, it’s me and Aunt Bee and Clara Edwards now, ambling to garden shows, working on quilts and fretting about the weather. (Festus could have been best man.) That doesn’t keep me from wondering why fate and programming kept those two apart, and whether or not - had romanced blossomed - Andy could have talked Matt Dillion into doing it “the Mayberry way” and not packing heat.ĭoubt it. If you live long enough, these things happen.Īunt Bee was so old that the only other guy she could have realistically dated was Doc from “Gunsmoke,” but two different kinds of lives and eras and time slots kept that from happening. She was by far the oldest member of the Taylor clan and here I am, knocking on her door. I am only two years younger now than Frances Bavier was when she started being Aunt Bee on television, in 1960. One is that I am now closer to being Aunt Bea than I am to being Sheriff Taylor or - and this is way off in the rearview mirror - Opie Taylor. 6, 1989, only eight days short of her 87th birthday. ![]() Frances Bavier, the actress who played Bea Taylor, died. Happenstance helped me discover that 26 years ago today, the matriarch of what TV Guide (and I) call the Best TV Series of All-Time passed away in Siler City, N.C. Aunt Bee could cook, clean, garden, sew, organize.If she were a basketball player, she’d be a very short LeBron James. If the TV version was what you got, you still came out ahead. Did you ever know a real-life Aunt Bee, or have you known only the one on “The Andy Griffith Show”?
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