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Home to Mayberry

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By Lisa Gray
Posted Thursday, Aug. 2, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET

This is what Mayberry is supposed to be like:

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On a slow-moving afternoon, Sheriff Andy Griffith and Barney Fife are sitting on a porch. "Know what I'm gonna do?" Barney asks.

Andy grunts.

Barney says, "I'm gonna go home, take a nap, go over to Thelma Lou's, and watch a little TV."

A couple of seconds pass.

Barney pats his stomach. "Yep, that's what I'm gonna do—go home, take a nap, go over to Thelma Lou's, and watch a little TV."

A couple more seconds pass.

"That's it," says Barney. "Home, nap, over to Thelma Lou's …"

"Watch a little TV?" Andy asks.

My hometown, Mount Airy, N.C., calls itself "the real Mayberry." And usually, when I bring my husband and kids to visit, we poke along at an appropriate small-town pace. Maybe we go swimming, or maybe we don't. We take naps. We go to Wal-Mart. We watch a lot of TV.

This time, I mess up that schedule by working. I'm a reporter, and so because I want to know more about Mount Airy's relationship to Mayberry, I try to schedule an interview with Andy Griffith.

I don't manage to reach Griffith or his agent, but still, my parents are impressed that I might talk to Andy Griffith. In their household, in terms of raw celebrity, he ranks second only to Elvis. And Elvis is dead.

My dad wants to know what I'll ask Andy. My mom wonders what to do if he calls while I'm out.

The situation feels like a plot from The Andy Griffith Show: Flustered small-town people want to impress a big-time TV star.

Everything, in fact, begins to feel as if it were lifted from The Andy Griffith Show. Bacon and TV are controlled substances at my house in Houston, but Ben, my 3-year-old, knows that they flow freely here at his grandparents'.

He eats nothing but bacon for breakfast and nothing but bacon for lunch. For dinner he requests … bacon.

"No way," I say.

Ben cries.

My dad intercedes. "Ben," he says, "how would you like some ice cream?"

I want to check my e-mail, so I plug my parents' phone line into my laptop then listen for the modem's three-note mating call. At home in Houston, I've grown used to the silent, effortless speed of broadband, but rural North Carolina doesn't offer the option. I try to put myself in a Mayberry frame of mind. I work up weird nostalgia for the creaky modem connection and derive an old familiar satisfaction from the river sound of flowing data.

The nostalgia doesn't last long. When I instruct the laptop to download my e-mail, the status bar doesn't surge forward. It just sits there.

I try to be Mayberry-style patient. I fetch myself a cup of coffee, and when I return, nothing has changed. I go to the bathroom: Still nothing. I check to see whether the laptop has crashed, but no. Everything is creeping along.

After I've waited 10 minutes, the machine beeps an error message. I've lost my connection.

My mom confesses that she picked up the kitchen phone. She didn't know anybody was using the line.

I try to frame the incident the way the Mount Airy Visitors Center would. They'd say life here moves at a slower pace. And everything seems more personal.