There Is A Time
In 1974-75, I was in the third grade. I attended a new school that year after moving to a house just a few minutes on foot from my paternal grandparents’ home.
In my mind’s eye, I can see the street that ran past the school on one side, and a garage in front of which I saw the first school fight I can remember, two older kids punching and wrestling in a display at once frightening and fascinating. I attended my first funeral while we lived in that house, and for some time after the dead man, a friend of my father’s, would appear on the stairs of an evening to terrify me while I played in the living room.
I had a friend at the new school named James. At recess, we would pretend to be different raptors from a paperback guide to the birds that one of us owned. I especially liked a few species of eagle: the golden, because it was the most majestic animal I had ever seen outside the world of cats,
but also the monkey-eating, a fearsome animal that is also known as the Philippine eagle. The internet informs me, sadly, that the monkey-eating eagle is now critically endangered and likely to go extinct in the wild soon.I remember too feeling a little bit smarter than my friend James, whom I considered very bright, because he routinely mispronounced the name of one of his favorite raptors, the martial eagle (he said “mar-tee-al”). Once I had confirmed with an adult that I had the right pronunciation, I didn’t correct him because I wanted the little piece of evidence of my intellectual superiority to remain intact, a small bit of status in the competitive game of boyhood friendship.
Another thing I remember from third grade is that, after school every day, I walked to the beauty shop where my mother worked, and generally stayed with her there until she closed up for the day. Sometimes I would beg for a few quarters and go down a few doors in the little commercial center where the shop was situated to a laundromat that had machines that dispensed candy and one of my obsessive objects of interest then: Little plastic replica NFL team helmets.
There was a small black and white television set in the front of the shop, and I spent a good deal of time in front of it. One of the programs I remember seeing frequently there was The Andy Griffith Show.
It had finished its near decade run from 1960-1968 by then, and was showing in reruns along with other sitcoms from the ‘60s that I greatly enjoyed such as Gilligan’s Island, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gomer Pyle, and The Brady Bunch. For those who don’t know The Andy Griffith Show, it was centered on a sheriff in a small rural town in North Carolina, raising his young son alone after the early death of his wife and generally helping locals sort through various problems, with generous amounts of country humor.
The cast of characters included Andy’s aunt Bea, who lived with them, Barney Fife, Andy’s hilariously incompetent deputy (who somehow still had a pretty girlfriend Thelma Lou, portrayed by the actress Betty Lynn, who left us only just this past October), and a number of other unforgettable figures. Ernest T. Bass, a wild mountain man who occasionally turned up in Mayberry for some adventure complicated by his complete, uproariously comical inability to follow the rules of civilized life, was one of my favorites.
Something about the show just exuded warm reassurance and comfort to me as I watched. Here was a world—fictional, yes, but for a third-grader, still quite touching, and I still feel it watching the show today—in which human decency always prevailed, simple truths were spontaneously affirmed and reaffirmed, and people looked out for one another in need.
Among the occasional guests on The Andy Griffith Show were the Darling family, led by the patriarch Briscoe. Like Ernest T. Bass, they lived in the natural and cultural wilds of the mountains outside Mayberry. In an early Darlings appearance, Ernest T. tries to court Roscoe’s daughter Charlene, who has just married another man, and Andy has to intervene to sort things out.
The Darling family were also a bluegrass band, and a darned good one. Briscoe’s sons handled guitar, mandolin, banjo, and upright bass, and Charlene sometimes sang lead vocals.
In real life, the Darlings (the four sons, at least) were the Dillards, a band of brothers from Missouri who, I am thrilled to have discovered, were a significant influence on Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones learning the mandolin, which he used so beautifully in one of that band’s greatest underrated tunes, “The Battle of Evermore.”
One song the Darlings did on the show particularly touched my young heart. “There is a Time” told a wistful story of youthful love from the perspective of someone looking on from a later stage in life. Charlene’s vocal was heartfelt and unaffected, as delightful and pure as a mountain spring. I fully shared Andy’s words at the song’s conclusion: “Well, I believe that’s the purtiest thing I ever heard.”
I don’t believe I had thought about the song consciously in many years when, of a sudden, and for no apparent reason, it reappeared in my head a decade or so ago and I immediately ran off to a keyboard to pick out the chords resonating in my memory. I remember sitting late into the night that day it mysteriously came back to me, running euphorically through the tune over and over again, thinking back to that third grader sitting in the beauty shop, recalling the lyrics and Charlene’s voice and getting a little misty-eyed and wistful myself.
Four days ago, last Sunday night, the actress who played Charlene Darling, Maggie Peterson, passed away at the age of 81. Thank you, Charlene/Maggie, and God bless you.
“There is a Time”
There is a time for love and laughter
The days will pass like summer storms
The winter winds will follow after
But there is love and love is warm
There is a time for us to wander
When time is young and so are we
The woods are greener over yonder
The path is new, the world is free
There is a time when leaves are falling
The woods are grey the paths are old
The snow will come when geese are calling
You need a fire against the cold
There is a time for us to wander
When time is young and so are we
The woods are greener over yonder
The path is new, the world is free
So when you're roaming in the springtime
And you find your love in the summer sun
The frost will come and bring the harvest
And you can sleep when day is done
There is a time for us to wander
When time is young and so are we
The woods are greener over yonder
The path is new, the world is free
The path is new, the world is free
I only just discovered it is also the national bird of Mexico.