I don't live in Long Beach, but I have driven in that city most of my life. Much of my family lives in that city, my church is in Long Beach, and I drive through it at least twice a week. I should know a lot about it. I should be able to identify and locate major streets by name.
I mix up words that begin with the same letter. I usually look at the first letter of a word and just jumble the rest. I think this came from speed reading. I would read the first letter of a character's name and say to myself, "Oh, the M girl said that." This can be a problem in that I get March and May confused constantly. I often switch student's names up. Hieu and Hien are always the same. Angela and Angelica I usually just mumble out and Trinh, Trang, Trong, Thong, and Thang are hopelessly mixed up without apology from me.
If only this key piece of information was posted somewhere on my car. While driving through Long Beach last Tuesday night, a man pulled up beside me and rolled down his window. I know what you're thinking...don't respond, just drive away. A strange man wants to talk to you...in Long Beach. But I'm unable to think defensively and so I rolled down my window expecting him to tell me my headlight is out.
"Can you tell me where Willow is?"
I should have said the truth, which is a blazing and pathetic, "no." But I knew I should be able to direct someone from Cherry to Willow. I've driven past it a million times. I know that it is south of my current position, but which W street am I thinking of? Woodruff, Wardlow, and Willow become this mixed up jumble of street names and locations and suddenly I have no idea where Willow is. Does this stop me?
"Make a u-turn and turn right on Carson, you'll hit Wardlow and then turn right you should eventually hit Woodruff and turn right, then you'll hit Willow."
Immediately I know how wrong I am. Wardlow is parallel to Carson, so unless he's driving on some non-Euclidean streets, he's never going to make it. As he is following my doomed and stupid directions, I shout out more jumbled information from my window. It's only after I'm on the freeway that I realize how stupid my directions were and I pray for the poor guy who is potentially following them.
Why, out of all the cars did he pick mine? Do mini's seem friendlier? Was the Phi Beta Kappa sticker on the back a possible indicator of intelligence. Well, I'm sure he's aware by now how wrong he was in his choice.
1 comment:
Your story reminded me of the people in Guatemala: even if they didn't know where the place was that was being asked about, they would give directions to somewhere. I found this out firsthand when we had to complete a scavenger hunt in Antigua to get to know the city better. There were a couple of places we never got to on that scavenger hunt, because whoever we asked didn't want to say those words: "I don't know."
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