Lost and Found

As I was driving home from The Metropolis today, I realized that I had no idea where I was, and even less idea how to get to a place I DO know.

This happens to me a lot.

I am a terrible map reader. Wait; strike that. I can READ a map, but for whatever reason, I just can't put it to good use. There is just no connection for me between the lines and squiggles on the paper and whatever road I happen to be on at any given time. It's AWFUL. This is why I will never live more than ten miles from my job, and why I always put a full tank of gas in the car before I leave the county.

You might think that familiarity with a particular route would keep me from taking a side trip. You would be wrong.

Today, for example, I was coming home from the yarn store--a place I have been a good many times WITHOUT getting lost--and I wound up at the city hospital, across the street from my dad's high school. I had never driven myself there before, yet inexplicably, there I was, staring at the pine trees my dad had to plant during Saturday School during the 70s.

I cannot count the number of times I have tried to come home from the mall by way of Nashville, which is nowhere near here. I have been lost in the ghetto of St. Louis--at night; I have driven through some of the most back-country parts of southeast Missouri by accident; I found the Mississippi River when I just wanted to go to Sonic; I went to Bowling Green, Kentucky, when I was trying to get to Illinois. I could go all night on this list.

There is only one place in the world where I well and truly had the ability to read and follow a map. That place is London. In my own British Bizarro World, I was able to look at a map of the Underground and determine whether I wanted to take the Circle Line or the District Line. I knew what bus to take at what time and to what destination. I even walked from Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace by looking at a map. THAT HAD NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE.

I was thinking about that today, as I tried to figure out whether I wanted to take the interstate east or west, or if I wanted to go north or south on a state highway. I was remembering how, for five full days, I always knew exactly where I was, where I was going, and how I was going to get there. And I think, since that is such a huge and unnatural event, that London should put that on their tourist information: MEI FLOWER DID NOT GET LOST HERE.

No other city on earth can make the same claim.