Entry 1:

"Are you visiting?" asks the baby-faced staffer at the Mount Airy Visitors Center.

"Yeah," I say, a little too fast. "I live in Houston." It's true, but it's not the whole truth. I grew up here in Mount Airy, N.C., and my family still lives here. I am visiting Mount Airy, but I'm not a tourist.

My mom is standing behind me, and I worry that she might try to tell Baby Face more than he needs to know. I say, again too fast, "I'm interested in Mayberry."

Which is also true and also incomplete. I am interested. Andy Griffith grew up in Mount Airy, too, and naturally, TheAndy Griffith Show's dinky Carolina town resembled a certain real-life dinky Carolina town. Where Mount Airy had Pilot Mountain, Mayberry had Mount Pilot. Mayberry and Mount Airy both had moonshiners, county fairs, and bluegrass pickers. Both had a Main Street.

When I was a kid, the town's relationship was clear. Mount Airy was Life, and Mayberry was Art (or at least TV). Life came first, but Art polished Life, punched it up, and inserted commercial breaks. Art made Life seem more important.

But lately, it's getting hard to tell where Life stops and Art begins. As the tobacco, textile, and furniture businesses have gone to pot, Mount Airy has turned to tourism. The small town now sells the small-town experience—the Mayberry experience, as seen on TV. "Everybody's hometown," the visitors center calls the place.

But I wasn't sure it was my hometown anymore. I'd come to the visitors center to see Mount Airy's new public face, and I wasn't sure whether I'd recognize it.

The Mount Airy Visitors Center, like all visitors centers, urges tourists to view "a short informational videotape." The code phrase usually means "homegrown infomercial with low production values," and this video is no exception. But it stars a Don Knotts/Barney Fife impersonator whose bug-eyed, tight-wound presence adds significance to the dullest statements. "Mount Airy is an interesting place," he says, "and it's surrounded by other interesting places." I laugh at the perfect small-town banality of the statement, then look around the room. It's full of white-haired tourists, and nobody else is laughing.

I tell myself not to think too much, but it's too late. I'm heading deep into a postmodern tizzy. Mount Airy, a real town, wants to present itself as Mayberry, a fictional town, and to help it do so, it's hired an impersonator play an actor who played a TV character. And heck, we visitors aren't even watching a live impersonator. We're watching him on TV. But maybe that's perfect—a more authentic Mayberry experience

A sock mill appears on the screen, and an invisible non-Barney narrator informs us that Mount Airy is home to a thriving textile industry. I glance sideways to see how my mom takes that statement. For years she folded socks on a factory line, but a few months ago, the mill's parent company, Sara Lee, moved its sock production to Mexico and laid off everyone at the mill.

My mom looks serene and respectful, the same way she looks Sunday mornings at church. So what if the video is out of date? She never liked that job anyway, and although she misses her paycheck, she's enjoying forcible retirement. She wants me to know that life is good here in Mount Airy.

The faux Fife returns to the screen. "It's no accident that Mount Airy reminds people of Mayberry," he says. "Time runs slower here, reminding people of the important things in life."

But life at the visitors center looks downright hectic. When the video is over, we've barely left our chairs before the next group fills them. I ask Baby Face whether the place is always so busy. "Oh, this is a slow day," he exults. "That's why we're all standing around chit-chatting."

Armed with a map of Mayberry points of interests, my mom and I head down Main Street. The Mount Airy history museum is closed, and so is Leon's Burger Express. We consider eating at the Snappy Lunch, the only real business ever mentioned on The Andy Griffith Show, but the slow-moving line stretches out the door and onto the sidewalk. We walk into Floyd's City Barber Shop, which like the TV-show Floyd's, advertises "Two chairs, no waiting." I count three full-size barber chairs. Tourists pose for pictures with the barber, whose name is not Floyd.

We visit the Mayberry Jail, once a working jail now tricked out to resemble Andy and Barney's headquarters. The effect is of a high-school stage set. An old green desk supports a "Justice of the Peace" plaque. A '60s-vintage police radio crouches on a side desk, and a stained cross-stitched sampler praises God. Signs on the wall say that due to the volume of tourists, the management can't allow anyone access to a toilet.

After that, there's nothing left to see on Main Street but souvenir shops, all selling high-markup T-shirts, mugs, and key chains that commemorate a less money-hungry time and place. As we walk back to the car, my mom and I try to remember how Main Street looked back when we used to shop there every Saturday, back when it was still the heart of a small town. The history museum—wasn't that a furniture shop? Where did Hinkle's, the office-supply store, used to be? And whatever happened to Rose's and Baldwin's, the big department stores?

We stopped shopping on Main Street in the early '70s, around the same time that everyone else stopped shopping on Main Street. The mall had better parking, and later, Wal-Mart had lower prices. Main Street withered because small-town people—like everybody else—sometimes care more about time and money than friendliness and tradition.

Main Street is bustling and lively, even on a Monday morning, because tourists don't obey the usual laws of economics. Tourists, God bless 'em, have time and money to burn—time for informational videos, money for T-shirts and key chains.

As my mom and I turn toward the parking lot, I notice how pretty Main Street has become. Hanging baskets of petunias sway in the breeze, and the sun glints off the gold name badges identifying a gaggle of Baptist tourists. I smile at the Baptists, and the Baptists smile back. The small, friendly moment doesn't seem quite real—and finally, I realize that there's no reason why it should. At last, I've had the Mayberry experience.

Photographs by Lisa Gray.