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Directional Sense

Alright, so you want to know about this thing I call my internal compass, or rather... the vacuum that occupies the space where it's supposed to be. Let me start with a simple example. About two years ago, I got lost in my own kitchen. It's not as impossible as it sounds. Ask anyone you know who's been applying to graduate school.

It started out simple enough. I went in there to get a cup of coffee but the pot was obscured from view by the reminder to send in my summer transcripts. Of course, summer classes wouldn't be over for another week. It never occurs to me, until after I've had to dial 911 to get out from under the To-Do lists, that I might be overcompensating just a wee bit for my tendency towards distraction.

Where was I? Oh yeah. The coffee pot. I lifted the note and another one fluttered down to land on the counter. "Follow your dream," screamed this particularly colorful flyer about a European Studies program in Florida. It reminded of the time my four year old had eaten a whole bag of skittles. She hurled a rainbow on my mother-in-laws new white carpet.

I started looking for the Tums.

*

The first time I was acutely aware of lacking a sense of direction was the year I turned five and started to play Tee-Ball. We were at the year-end league picnic, hosted at a sprawling green park nestled in a suburban neighborhood. I put down my half eaten hot dog on a stick and took off at a trot for the squat cement building across the park.

Mind you, this was decades ago. These were the days before parents escorted their kids to the bathroom, checked the stalls for crack dealers or worse, you know, back when the stalls still had their doors.

I turned around the L shaped wall, noticing that someone had graffitied all over it, then walked into the cool shade of the bathrooms. It wasn't until I went to wash my hands that I noticed how funny the sink looked. Not only did it look funny, it smelled weird too, and someone left a round cake of soap against the drain. Man, my mom was pissed when we did stuff like that with the soap.

I picked up the cake of soap and washed my hands in the sink with the handles I could find. I left it sitting there on the edge of the chipped enamel, still soaking wet. It was rough and rank. It took me years to understand the horrified look on my mother's face when she realized I'd thought a urinal cake was soap. My team-mates wouldn't let me live down using the Men's room for the rest of the summer. But, at least they had stopped

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