Goober Goes to an Auto Show

Season 8, Episode 22
Original Air Date: February 5, 1968

Goober hears that Andy is taking Aunt Bee and Opie to an auto show in Raleigh and invites himself along. He also happens to run into an old friend from mechanics school who appears to be doing quite well. The friend has a nice appearance, carries himself with confidence, and seems in every visible way to have arrived somewhere that Goober has not. The comparison lands before Goober has time to put his guard up.

Goober's response to feeling small is to pretend to be bigger. He begins dropping hints to his friend that he runs a chain of gas stations rather than just one. He picks up dinner tabs he cannot easily afford and plays the part of a successful businessman in a way that has nothing to do with who he actually is. The gap between the performance and the reality is uncomfortable to watch, partly because Goober is trying so hard and partly because the reason for it is so human.

Eventually the front becomes unsustainable. Goober is left to reckon with the fact that who he is, the single filling station owner with the good heart and the honest work, was nothing to be ashamed of in the first place.

The Lesson
The reflex to make yourself bigger around someone who makes you feel small is almost universal. Goober did not set out to lie. He set out to close a gap that existed mainly in his own perception. The lie made the gap worse because it added the weight of maintaining a fiction on top of the original discomfort.

A Lesson for Today
Comparisons with people who appear to be doing better are inevitable and very rarely helpful. What is more useful is the honest question of whether you are doing what you actually want to be doing, in a way that aligns with what you value. Goober owned a filling station in a town where people knew him and needed him. That is not a small thing dressed up as something bigger. It is already something.

Final Thought from Mayberry
Goober went to the auto show to see cars and ended up taking a closer look at himself. The self he found, the real one, was a better deal than the invented one. He just had to go to Raleigh to remember it.