I THINK I ALMOST got fi red from my first job outside Alabama because I had a hard time finding my way around. It shouldn’t have been such a challenge. I was in Clearwater, Florida, where there are only three directions you can go in anyway. Head west, and you’ll end up with wet socks. But I managed to get lost all the time. I’d warned them that this might happen, but the editor who interviewed me said, “Pshaw, we’ll give you a good map.”
“But I tend to have trouble with those,” I explained.
He responded that it was okay, since many of the streets in the area were numbered. Then I had to confess that I might still have issues.
“Why?” he asked, thinking maybe I had been a poor investment. “Can’t you count?”
I got lost in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and even on a train from Manchester to London. The train knew exactly where it was, but I forgot the name of my hotel when I stepped off onto what I’d hoped was Victoria Station.
“I don’t see what good I can do you, guv’na,” said the cabdriver when I admitted I had no idea where to go from there. I told him—and I am sadly not making this up—to just drive around and maybe it would come to me.
Then came the invention of GPS. But as every rural Southerner knows, this is a flawed system. Most of the places I need to go in Alabama are not yet on the grid. Apparently, I live in a great, blank, empty hiss, where the GPS can find no purchase. So I wander still.
Like most things, I usually just blame it on my upbringing.
We did not have maps. Our landmarks were the mountains and the gaps between them, old wood churches, shuttered mills, rusted-down brickyards, and a truck that had coughed to a stop in the middle of a blackberry thicket in 1953 and would never, ever come to life again. After about a generation, someone finally hauled it off for scrap, but it did not change the cartography of the place.
“Go for about 3 miles, and then turn left there on that road where the Chevrolet truck used to be,” someone would tell me.
My hometown of Jacksonville, Alabama, has a little spot called Calhoun Steakhouse, one of those rare gems where the food is good every single time.
The problem is that the building used to be a Pizza Hut, and my people stubbornly say it always will be.
“Want to go get a hamburger steak?” I’ll ask them.
“At the Pizza Hut?” they’ll respond.
“I reckon so,” I’ll sigh.
They refuse to turn loose the past, even when they walk in the door of this fine establishment.
“Where do you want to sit?” I’ll ask.
“Over by the salad bar,” they’ll answer.
That feature has been gone since…well, as long as the Pizza Hut has. Sometimes, when I stop to say hello to people there, it occurs to me that I’m standing right in the middle of the salad bar. So, feeling guilty somehow, I’ll move a few steps to the side.
My point is that I am simpleminded and am usually lost, at least a little bit, if I can’t refer to those unchanging landmarks.
We have a new Pizza Hut now—a real one—and I’m pretty sure that place doesn’t have a salad bar either.
illustration by JOHN CUNEO
