When the wire services announced that actor Andy Griffith was dead, a woman I know tweeted that his Andy Taylor character was "the father she never had."

Twitter is a terribly uncommunicative kind of communication, but her tweet harpooned me in the heart, and I left the office and stood on the sidewalk to smoke.

And remember.

I'm 55, living at that shaky juncture where we begin to edit our own lives, to remember things as better than they were. It is how we convince ourselves that we have not just lived through life, that we have come from something fine.

I fight that feeling because it's destructive.

In my extreme youth, in a small New England city of factory work and deep snow, where it always seemed to be dusk, I lived more Mayberry than I think you can find now — not in the richest neighborhood with the biggest lawns, not in the suburb where 90 percent of the high school graduates go on to at least a junior college.

I did not call my father "Paw," and he did not like to fish. My father could not play hillbilly music on the guitar. My father was the child of immigrants, and he sometimes spoke to me in a language other than English. When my father, dead 25 years, comes to me in dreams, many times we don't speak English.

What Mayberry had was certainty. The factory job that wasn't going anywhere. A church in your neighborhood. In my case, a Catholic school the nuns ran like a battleship.

I didn't live long in that Mayberry America.

First, everyone made more money. And then, because we had more money than anyone in our family had ever had, we began to believe that we could not be wrong, and we sent the kids to college, and they came back different, not so much questioning values as yearning to break things because they had not been taught how hard it is to build things.

God didn't seem so frightening, and the president could be not just wrong but demonically wrong, and you could swear in front of women.

We drowned Mayberry under a rolling wave of arrogance, divorce, license, drugs and bastardy, until we stood in the silent downtown of some small city and looked at empty storefronts and alleys where the junkies bled from their wounds.

Ah, but when I was 10, if I did not live in Mayberry, I could see it from my porch. It was the porch of a house we rented, but it was a porch — and it was deep, and the trees arched over it as the New England dusk came down with single flakes of snow.

In the last years of certainty, in the last years of non-chain pharmacies, in the last years when the name on the sign out front was the name of the guy behind the counter, in the last years before Jesus became a political clown, there was a brief balance, a few warm years when it was hard to starve and easy to find a job, when it was easy to get your nose broken in a fight but hard to get shot in a robbery, when it was hard to get sex if you were single and hard to get divorced if you were married.

That kind of balance never lasts. It melts like sugar in hot coffee, like an ice cube on a griddle, like heroin in a spoon.

Then we were free to speak our minds, so we swore and we got women pregnant and left them as soon as we could, and it was never really dusk again, just bright, itchy sunlight or dangerous night.

Calling the loss of Mayberry a phenomenon of liberal or conservative politics is astoundingly stupid, but it's a good excuse, and it gives everyone someone else to blame. It wasn't what "the government" did, it was what we did that ended it.

It was just a TV show, right?

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com