This blog is going to be stupid. I knew before I even began writing it that it was going to be stupid. Quiet, Ron.
I had to turn off The Andy Griffith Show last night. Not for any bad reason, of course. It's the Andy Griffith Show, Mayberry and rural America from the early 1960s for cryin' out loud. Nothing really bad ever happened there. But I simply had to flip to another station. I felt too bad, terrible in fact, for Opie.
Young Opie brought in a report card which was all A's. He was proud, and his Paw Andy was proud, and Aunt Bee was proud. The it turned out that the teacher has made a mistake and transposed the wrong grades onto the boy's card. It was an honest enough mistake, but watching Opie slump his shoulders and become forlorn, standing next to his teacher's desk as she apologized for the error, well, I felt awful for him.
Then in the next scene Andy is showing Aunt Bee the bike he bought Opie as a reward for the good grades, and all I could think was how much worse the youngster was going to feel when he was given it. I had to change the channel. I could not watch it.
It probably didn't help that the show immediately before was one where Opie, completely accidentally, killed a mother bird. To make up for it, he raised the babies by himself, only to have to deal with letting them fly off on their own when they were old enough. I had a lump in my throat over that.
Then comes the erroneous report card episode. I knew everything would be all right in the end. Like I say, it was Mayberry. Still, I couldn't keep watching.
Not that long ago I didn't believe that I was becoming as sentimental as I long expected to be as I aged. Now it looks like I'm going off the cliff, dripping with cloying empathy.
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