"Mom, we've been walking around for two hours - where is the car?" asked Daniel, my 10 year old who was red faced and tired of downtown Atlanta. "It hasn't been two hours, it's been closer to 45 minutes and I'm pretty sure it's this way." I replied as we walked down another side street in search of our Honda Civic. A hot June day was not the best time of year to lose your car with two kids in tow. So many of the streets in the City Too Busy to Hate look alike and many of the ticketed parking areas are run by the same company and are identical to each other. "Daniel, be nice, she's doing the best she can," my daughter Amber offered in my defense but the way she said it seemed like a left handed compliment.
We had started the day down at downtown Atlanta from the highest point - the Westin Hotel - which has a restaurant on the 73rd floor that rotates so you can see for 10 to 20 miles from the top. We saw people the size of fire ants playing in the fountains of Centennial Park. We could see Stone Mountain which was about 20 miles away and Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves. Everything was a picture perfect Atlanta day until it was time to go home. At the fifty minute mark of the auto quest and after several prayers to Saint Anthony (the patron saint of lost things) - we finally saw our blue car with the telltale dent in the driver's side. The sense of relief was amazing. Once I was in the car and turned on the AC - I drove out of Atlanta finally sure of where I was going.  |
I've always been directionally challenged. At age three I wondered away from a White House tour with my parents and four other brothers and sisters. According to my mother, I somehow slipped out of the line and started to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. Apparently the head of the U.S. Archive happened to be looking out his window and saw a toe headed toddler in a paisley jumper sprinting down the street holding my own hand (you always needed to hold a hand crossing streets even if the only hand to hold is yours). He saw that I was headed away from the White House (apparently other small children had also tried to make a break for it) and sent his assistant down to get me and take me back. I remember this very tall man with jet black hair on the sides of his head, bald on top and a thin black tie leaning over and saying "May I help you little girl?" He picked me up and took me back to the White House lobby to my worried but relieved parents and a few Secret Service Agents.
Another time, at age four I wondered away from our camp at Yellowstone Park around dusk. My parents looked frantically all over the trailer park where we were staying until they found me a few trailers over where I was sitting down with a retired couple eating cookies. After all if you're going to get lost - be found by someone with a good stash of snacks. It was not the negative reinforcement that my parents might have hoped for. Eventually, they started to use one of those harnesses so that at least I was just an arm's length away. Some people might have called it a kiddy leash, but for my parents, it was a tether to some peace of mind.
I've often tried to figure out why my sense of direction is so bad. I've relied on internet services like MapQuest only to be led astray and had to figure out how to get back home myself. At those times when I simply cannot find my destination, I try to comfort myself in saying that I've discovered the road not taken. That can be of little comfort when your meeting starts in 10 minutes and you should be 5 minutes away but still have no idea where you are. When I'm lost, I feel like that scared little three year old walking alone in Washington, D.C. However as an adult, I have developed the additional skill of being able to weave a tapestry of obscenity as I turn down another fruitless road.
I've even tried using mobile navigators with mixed results. I loved that episode of The Office when Michael Scott was trying to prove that man was better than machines and when his GPS told him that the road existed where it was obvious that a lake was, he drove into the water just to prove the machines were wrong. Sometimes you can't rely on a GPS to get you where you need to go and you just flat out have to figure it out yourself. Giving up is not an option - you have to find your way home and back to where you need to be.
What I have found is that by going down the road not taken (mostly by accident) you find another way to get to your destination. You see things off the beaten path - unique homes, landscapes, lakes, small towns and farms with cows and horses. You ask strangers for directions and while some are irritated, most have empathy and are happy to point you to the right path home. In college, I had a group of older men in a not so great neighborhood console me and give me a cup of coffee because I think they would want someone to do the same thing for their daughters.
I think in being lost, you have a chance to figure out who you are, both the good and the bad. The bad parts can seem like you never seem to get where you need to go either in this excursion or in life. Every bad thing that you believe about yourself seems to crystalize in those moments of misguided isolation. The good part at the end of the road is that you conquer the fear, loneliness, and despair to find your way back from God knows where. In life, you'll remember to avoid those roads that take you to the wrong places both spiritually and emotionally
I've never seen the world as a straight and narrow path but with all sorts of trails that can take you to some interesting places. At the point of utter frustration when I've been driving around aimlessly for an hour or so, I try to calm myself by saying that I'm in a safe place, my guardian angels are with me and how much I'll really appreciate seeing my home once I get there. I'll give Max a huge kiss and hear my children ask yet again, "Mom what took you so long - did you get lost again?" I'll smile and say yes and tell them about the pony I saw on this back road that you wouldn't expect to see so close to Atlanta. When you open up to those possibilities there are times when you get to see a sunset over a neighborhood lake that looks like a golden pond with touches of pink - and those moments take your breath away. It's something that you never would have caught on I-85 at the height of rush hour.
Our excursion to the Westin inspired Daniel to write an essay for one of his first assignments in the 5th grade. His teacher showed the paper to me at our last conference. He concluded his paper with this: "I learned three things that day - my Mom has a terrible sense of direction, the skyline of Atlanta from the Westin is awesome and when my Mom is lost, she has a very dirty mouth."
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