Lost and found (no thanks to Tim)

I’ve written before about how much it bothers me to lose things. Materials objects, that is. I just feel that the material world is something you should be able to count on. People can be unpredictable. So can weather and natural disasters and political situations and boating conditions and reader response. But knowing that you’ll be able to find your keys wherever you last placed them – because they’re not going to decide to go for a walk, or have a change of heart about their fealty toward you, or decide it would be funny to hide – is something you should be able to count on. Object permanence matters to me; it’s one constant in a world of entropy.

And for that reason, I’m careful with objects. I pay attention to where I place things. “Is this where I’m most likely to look for it next time I need it?” I ask myself when I put something down. I’m mindful about having specific places for specific belongings and not mindlessly leaving things in places other than where they normally go.

So it was frustrating not to be able to find my pedometer chip yesterday morning. This is a little plastic oblong that plugs in to my iPod and tracks my mileage while I run. Unfortunately, since it’s about an inch long and white, it’s nearly invisible. So I always leave it in the same place, with my iPod and headphones, when I’m done running.

Yesterday, the fact that it wasn’t there gave me the feeling that something was ever so slightly wrong with the world. An object had picked itself up and gone away; that isn’t supposed to happen.

It wasn’t essential that I have it right away, but it’s so small and inconsequential in appearance that I knew if I didn’t find it quickly, it could simply be swept under a bookshelf or tracked outside with the dog or brought out to the recycling bin with the mail.

And as neurotic as it makes me sound, I felt a little off-kilter all day, knowing that a tiny fraction of my attention was diverted wondering where this little piece of plastic could be.

I told my 13-year-old about the problem when he got home from school. “So just keep an eye out for it,” I concluded. I expected relative indifference on his part, but to my surprise, he immediately started looking on the floor below the mudroom shelf. “I bet it’s either here or in the laundry basket,” he said.

“Why would you think that?” I asked.

“Because those are the only places it could have landed when I knocked it off the shelf last night,” he said.

A ha. A clue. “If you knocked it off the shelf, why didn’t you pick it up?” I asked him.

“Well, I looked for a minute, but I didn’t see it right away, so I figured it had to have fallen either on the floor or into the laundry basket under the shelf and you’d find it eventually.”

Exasperated but hopeful, I lifted a pile of clean laundry out of the basket. My odometer chip tumbled out.

“Tim, if you know you’ve knocked something off a shelf, look for it!” I said, incredulous not for the first time – more like the ten thousandth time – at the seemingly obvious truisms that need to be stated to 13-year-old boys.

“I figured it couldn’t be too far away,” he shrugged.

So now all is well. I have my odometer back and my faith restored in the material world. Tim has learned what I would have assumed was intuitive: if you drop something, pick it up. Okay, realistically, Tim probably has not learned that. But surely a mom can dream.

Busy day

By seven thirty last night, I felt like a character in a Richard Scarry picture book. Except much sweatier and with less colorful clothes. But just as busy busy busy. And when it was time to leave to take Holly to her evening library program, I was very sad to wave goodbye to my uneaten dinner.

After I’d worked frantically to complete an article about Fourth of July observances throughout the region, a morning phone interview for which I’d slotted a typical 45 minutes started fifteen minutes late and lasted an hour and a quarter, so by the time I hung up it was noon, and I’d promised Holly a trip to the drugstore before the morning was over (I knew my best bet at getting her to apply sunscreen on a regular basis was if I let her pick out the sunscreen herself, a decision she would doubtlessly base on the color and shape of the bottle).

Back from our CVS run, I made lunch for her and Tim, and then it was time to bring Holly to a friend’s house for the afternoon. I tried not to think too much about Rick’s dire comment that the warning light on the Prius indicated that one of the tires was leaking air and would soon be flat. Just one more trip, I mentally urged the car, and then I promise our next stop will be the mechanic.

But Holly’s friend had just moved to North Chelmsford, and while Chelmsford borders on Carlisle, North Chelmsford borders on Lowell. Needless to say, with my notorious sense of direction, I left North Chelmsford and headed the wrong way; soon I was crossing out of Dracut and into Methuen, rather than out of South Chelmsford and into Carlisle as I’d hoped.

Through Lowell, around the UMass campus, through Dracut, into Methuen, turn around retrace steps, and finally I was on the highway heading toward our mechanic in Littleton. One wrong turn in Littleton, easily corrected at a gas station, and finally I was there…with fifteen minutes to spare before I needed to pick Tim up back at home and bring him to his Little League game in Arlington. I explained my plight to the service department. “The tire pressure warning light is on, but I got lost on the way here and I have no time at all,” I bemoaned.

The technician looked up my records. “You got lost coming from Carlisle to Littleton?” he asked.

“No, I was in Chelmsford but ended up in Methuen.”

“Well, you can’t keep driving around on that tire,” he said. “We’ll get to it as quickly as we can.”

I called Tim and told him to fill his water bottle, put on his uniform, assemble his bat bag and be ready when I returned because we’d have to go straight to the game. I sat on pins and needles in the waiting room, wreaked with anxiety, trying to tell myself again and again that there was simply nothing to do but wait it out. I reminded myself that this was trivial: a car repair, a baseball game; nothing to develop a migraine over. But still, I knew what Rick would say: poor planning. Somehow I should have figured out how to line up the whole day more effectively.

The technician called me over. The tire was repaired, and it was cheap, which was a welcome surprise. I drove to Carlisle, picked up Tim, drove to Arlington, and dropped him off at the field nine minutes before first pitch. The players are supposed to arrive 45 minutes early for warm-ups, but since Rick is normally in charge of baseball transportation for Tim, this was the first time all season – actually probably ever – that he’d arrived late, so I knew he’d be forgiven this once.

Home at last, but I hadn’t yet run my daily mile, so out I went to do that. With a half-hour left before I needed to meet up with Holly for an evening program at the library, I made my go-to quick-meal recipe: pasta with sautéed garlic, cherry tomatoes, arugula and walnuts. Just as I was about to take my first bite of pasta, the phone rang: it was the man who had taken over Old Home Day pie contest duties for me this year, after I decided that I needed a break from that annual responsibility, and he had a lot of questions. I cast longing glances at my plate of pasta as I explained how to prepare the tasting plates for the judges and why I thought the final score should be averaged rather than cumulative. “It’s a pie contest,” I wanted to tell him. “Just do it however you want. It really doesn’t matter.” But I answered his questions as well as I could and then left for the library.

We got home a little before nine and I had time then to eat. The tire was repaired; Tim’s baseball game was over; Holly had enjoyed the library program; my Fourth of July article was filed. Busy day, just like in a Richard Scarry book. But it all ended well. And the pasta was absolutely delicious.

Lessons to be learned from a terrible sense of direction

I have a terrible sense of direction. If ever there was a driver who should use GPS technology, it is me, but I don’t have a GPS and that’s probably just as well: it forces me to work consistently on improving this deficiency. Still, it’s been a struggle for as long as I can remember.

The past couple of weeks have been particularly egregious. Along with the notorious drive to the Manchester airport with my sister Sarah, there was the event last Friday night when an exit closure in Portland forced us to take a different route off the highway than we normally do, dumping me in an unfamiliar part of the city after dark. Tim not only recognized a street name miles from our destination but also somehow intuited which way the ocean was; taking what felt like a leap of faith, I followed my 12-year-old’s instructions and found myself right where I wanted to be. And there was a very brief (three-mile) wrong-way foray when we were leaving Portland to head home that hardly even merits mention. Then a few days later, my mother and I got a little confused driving to a town north of us for apple picking (and, if I am to be completely honest, driving home from that excursion as well).

The point is not to belabor my horrible sense of direction; I’m well aware of that, and I do what I can to compensate for it. I keep a vigilant eye on landmarks I’m passing when I know I’ll need to retrace my steps, and I pay close attention to the position of the sun when I’m driving in daylight so that at the very least I know whether I’m headed toward the right compass point. Rather, what I’ve come to realize from this recent spate of poor directional decisions is what can be learned, literally and metaphorically, from taking so many wrong turns.

For example, during the Manchester airport debacle, Sarah and I took the wrong exit off a toll road. On toll roads, the exits are far apart, and we realized milliseconds after failing to make the necessary turn what we had done, so we had plenty of time – twelve miles’ or so worth of time – to belabor our error. But the fact is that when you’re on a highway after missing your exit, there is absolutely not a single option other than to proceed forward. Pulling over would be dangerous and pointless; turning around is obviously not possible. Realizing you’ve made a terrible mistake, you simply forge ahead until the opportunity arises to correct it, in the form of the next exit appearing. You can’t sit in your car stewing over your mistake; you have no other viable choice than to stick with the bad decision you’ve made and see it through until the opportunity comes to make a different choice. That’s a good lesson.

Another one is that speed is not necessarily the way to right a wrong. When I used to commute by Peter Pan bus, the driver once commented to me, “I don’t know what’s wrong with all these other drivers. Don’t they realize you can go only as fast as the car in front of you?” Now, I remind myself of that when I’m caught in traffic and getting frustrated. It doesn’t matter if you want to go faster or get there sooner; you’re at the mercy of the car in front of you. Take a deep breath and accept that.

Also this: Many mistakes can be fixed. Not all of them, of course. If you cause an accident, that can’t be fixed. But if you miss your flight, you can catch another flight. If you keep a friend waiting inordinately long, you can apologize profusely and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Changing plans might be inconvenient or even, as in the case of rescheduling a flight, costly. But as the anxiety rises, remind yourself to distinguish between those mistakes that have irreversible consequences and those that do not.

And, finally, perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from getting lost: nothing about arriving matters as much as arriving safely. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you’re late or if you wasted some gas with wrong turns. It doesn’t matter if you made some bad decisions along the way. It matters only that you eventually reached your destination without an accident.

I don’t take my errors in direction lightly. It’s a personal flaw over which I need to continue to exercise more control. But I do appreciate the learning opportunity that this spate of wrong turns over the past few weeks provided me. I’ll try to learn what I can, and make more correct turns in the future.