Driving Me Crazy

When I was a kid, my family used to go to Thrifty's Drug Store for pancakes. They had a long counter with glass cases displaying things like glazed donuts and lemon meringue pie, and their breakfast menu had, in addition to the plain pancakes we always ordered, many fancy varieties: strawberry shortcake pancakes, drizzled with strawberry syrup; chocolate chip pancakes festooned with loops of snow-white whipped cream. For years, I went along with the flow and let my frugal mother order for me; we always got the plain ones, served with butter and syrup. But in my heart of hearts, I wanted the fancy pancakes. I wanted to be one of those lucky people who had set in front of them a steaming plateful of pancakes studded with strawberries and lavishly sprayed with whipped cream. One Sunday when I was ten, after years of whining and begging, I finally managed to wear my mother down: she let me order chocolate chip pancakes. "You'll never finish them," she insisted. "They'll make you sick. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach." I was determined to prove her wrong, but halfway through my towering stack of pancakes smothered with cream and liberally peppered with chocolate chips, I gave up. I felt sick of cream and butter and chocolate chips and I didn't mind if I never saw another pancake as long as I lived. And -- shock of shocks! -- I left pancakes, uneaten, on my plate. We did lots of weird things in my family, but leaving food on our plates was not one of them. So a trifling thing like this which might have been quickly forgotten in any other family went down in our family annals as a Big Deal.

My family never forgot my greedy, wasteful lust for chocolate chip pancakes and they never let me forget it either. After the chocolate chip pancake incident, whenever I wanted to order anything in a restaurant that was a little exotic, a little off the culinary beaten track, they reminded me of the chocolate chip pancakes I hadn't been able to finish. And I kid you not: twenty years later, they still remembered it and brought it up from time to time, whenever we went out to eat -- my sisters, my father -- even my mother. Needless to say, this got old fast.

I tell you this story because my family's reaction to this silly incident had a profound effect on my own parenting. I vowed that I would never do the same to my kids: I would never remember some trifling thing they had done at some point in their young lives and rub their noses in it again and again, even when they were adults. I told myself I would forget their foolish deeds, that I would keep an open mind about their irritating foibles and habits and wait for them to mature and change. I just knew that by keeping an open mind -- and to the extent possible, a closed mouth -- I would gain my kids' respect and trust. And whatever they may tell you, I've been pretty good about this. They may maintain that I recall all too clearly the embarrassing events of their youth, but I've never come close to being as obnoxious as my parents were over the chocolate chip pancakes.

So the other day, when Eldest Daughter and Acquired Daughter said goodbye to me as I set off for Manchester International Airport with my husband and Youngest Daughter, I bristled when they teased me about ending up in Wales on my way back to Scotland. Just because this happened to me last year -- just because I struggle to find my way, being directionally challenged -- does not mean that I will necessarily make the same mistake twice. Even without my husband in the car to navigate, there was every chance that I would make it home just fine. Especially since this time I had consulted Google maps.

"You have filled the car this time," said Eldest. "Right?"

I ignored her.

"Call me when you get to Wales and I'll try to sort you out!" snickered Acquired Daughter.

This really got my back up. After only a year of shared residence, I've got the goods on Acquired Daughter and she knows how discreet I've been. So why is it that the restraint, the Herculean strength of will, has to be on the mother's side only? Why do I have to keep it all in, but they get to goad and tease and remind me of past embarrassments?

After seeing my husband onto the plane bound for Istanbul, Youngest Daughter and I got back into the car and, after a minor glitch or two, I got on the right road. I drove past the turn-off for Wales; I made it past Warsall and Lancaster and Preston, and although the possibilities for messing up were endless, I never wavered. As I drove, my heart filled with joy and pride: I had made it! I could go home now and wipe the smiles off my daughters' silly faces. Youngest sent them a triumphant text message: Five minutes from home! Mom is amazing! It was like she knew the way!!

The next thing I knew, though, she was tugging on my sleeve. "Mom, that was the turn-off. You missed it."

"What?" I frowned. "That wasn't the turn-off -- it's coming up, isn't it?"

Youngest stared straight ahead, then leaned forward onto her folded arms. "I can't believe it! I just said we would be there and you missed the turn off!"

I peered out the window. "Are you sure we've missed it?"

But even as I said it, I knew she was right. Youngest squeezed her eyes shut and banged her forehead gently against the dashboard. For five minutes, she wouldn't talk to me: she couldn't trust herself.

If her irritation seems extreme, I should add that we were hungry and thirsty and the car was virtually out of gas. And the next exit would not be for over 30 miles.

Two hours, a tank of gas, and a whole load of mother-daughter angst later, we made it home, in the pouring rain. Driving to Wales and missing the turn-off: they'll never let me forget it, will they?

I think I need a plate of chocolate chip pancakes.

From England To Scotland Via Wales

Something wonderful has just happened: I had to go into the hospital for minor surgery and I have been told that under no circumstances can I cook or do any work tonight. I am sitting in a room with virtually no furniture but my computer table and chair, and on all sides of me are pure chaos: china and glassware sitting in stacks; piles of neatly-folded winter clothes we won't need for at least a year; bedding, towels, and still more books, but tonight I can indulge in guilt-free dereliction of duty. So I am going to write about how I left Scotland for England on Monday and managed to end up in Wales on my way back.

We set off for Manchester Airport at seven o'clock. Our eldest sat huddled in the back, plugged into her MP-3 player, while our newly-acquired daughter and our youngest traded excited banter. Eldest is remaining with me to get everything packed up and the house closed; all the rest are off to our new home and country in the Middle East.

As soon as my husband's passport arrived, reservations were made for Monday. "You can drive back from Manchester, right?" he asked me as I sat surrounded by boxes of china, books, clothes, and general clutter. And like a dumb ass, I went and said yes. After all, he's taking two teenagers to a foreign country, starting a new job, learning a new culture, language -- the works. Surely I, a qualified driver for the past two years, could drive back to Scotland on my own. Piece of cake, right?

I began to get the jitters as we pulled into the many-tiered parking lot at Manchester Airport. I've never driven in one of those multi-storied parking lots before, though I've been driven through them on countless occasions. We drove around and around now in a dizzying circle and I wondered aloud how well I would negotiate the descent.

Eldest has just been learning to drive and when I voiced my worries on getting out of the parking lot, she commiserated. When I was learning to drive, she stood behind me while I did my hazard recognition on the computer and offered superfluous advice. She informed her sister that she would easily master driving; she had watched her father drive and she knew she'd be fine. God knows how I stood this, but I did.

Acquired daughter comes from a carless home, and whether that has anything to do with it or not, one of her greatest ambitions is to become a car racer. She loves speed and demolition derbies and all of the sorts of things that I find quite daunting, and though she has had no driving lessons herself, she too knows it will be a snap.

"It'll be easy!" she scoffed now, adding something of a non sequitur: "I've been in dozens of these!"

"Well I have too," eldest daughter said, frowning, "but I've never driven in one."

"Ach, it'll be easy!"

"How do you know?"

"I just do!"

"But you've never driven in one, have you?"

"No, but I know it'll be easy!"

Good thing she couldn't see my face.

After we'd seen everyone off, eldest and I made our way back to the car. With trembling fingers I started the ignition and inched slowly out of the car park. I managed to overshoot the exit on each floor and was a bundle of nerves at the end of my ordeal, but five minutes later we saw daylight and the first hurdle was over.

Then came finding my way out of the airport. To make a long story very short, I got lost.

"You can do it! Just follow the signs to the north," my husband had assured me. But even after years of marriage, he still doesn't get it. Some people can find their way using the sun and the stars and their own inherent sense of direction. My husband is one of them, and I am his diametric opposite.

And there were no signs to the north.

My eldest and I saw this right away. There were no big, Mary-friendly directions-for-idiots billboards that said SCOTLAND THIS WAY! FOLLOW THE RED LINE! Instead there were signs for places I only remembered fleetingly, like Preston, Birmingham, and Wrexham. Preston and Wrexham, I vaguely remembered, were in the north, but Birmingham wasn't, so what was the deal?

I stopped and asked directions at a hotel, managing some pretty hair-raising parking between two cars that made my daughter whimper and put her hands over her eyes, oh she of no faith. The receptionist was kind enough to print us out a sheet of directions, but neither my daughter nor I could follow them, so we managed to find the motorway again and bore, we hoped, towards the north.

Everything was looking pretty good until I started noticing that the signs were in Welsh. I stopped and asked for directions again, and I give the worker I interrupted real credit: he kept a perfectly straight face as he confirmed that we were indeed in Wales, though I'm sure he must have wondered at a frantic woman with an American accent asking him for directions to Scotland. He treated me with great kindness and gave me excellent directions, as did the man in the petrol station, and as by the time we got to him I was close to tears, I give him bonus points.

At the next place we stopped for directions, I wrote everything down but my daughter could not read my handwriting. At the next place, I got her to write out the directions, but neither of us could figure out what they meant.

"You're scaring me," said my eldest as I launched into my umpteenth impassioned tirade against husband for not walking me through the precise instructions. "Calm down!" Easy for her to say.

I'll spare you the nitty-gritty of the next hour of torment; let's just say that as I threaded my way through narrow streets and unfamiliar junctions, all the time trying desperately to follow my daughter's muddled and conflicting directions, I could feel individual white hairs popping out on my head. As massive trucks lumbered past and our car stalled for the fifth time in first gear (it even does this to my husband), I might as well have been main-lining free-radical-promoting poison. Never mind: all that matters is that we finally found the right motorway and got on it. In the right direction. And kept on driving until we got to Scotland, at which point we both broke into Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah and would have started on Handel's version too, if only she hadn't fallen asleep from pure nervous tension.

When we got back, the eldest said something to me that she's said several times now, ever since her first driving lesson -- something I can hardly hear too many times. "You were so right about driving. It's really tough. I'm sorry I acted like it was going to be easy."

If she can do that, maybe some day I'll acquire a sense of direction.

A Wild Goose Chase

My flat in Yokohama had a washing machine that did not work.

On my day off, I packed up some of my heavier clothes and went off in search of a Laundromat. I was tired of washing my clothes by hand. Someone had told me there used to be a laundromat not far from the next station, and I was determined to find it.

Half an hour later, I was ready to burst into tears: I’d been on a wild goose chase looking for that elusive laundromat for over thirty minutes, and I was damned if I could find it. My feet hurt, and my trousers weren’t warm enough because all my winter ones were in the pack, desperately in need of a wash. I was cold and tired and hungry, too, and yet here I was going in circles, looking for a wretched laundromat. Everyone I met knew just enough to give me hope, but not enough to give me precise instructions. I felt like I was doomed to wander the streets for all eternity, humping twenty pounds of dirty laundry, searching for the laundromat from Brigadoon.

It would have been better if someone had categorically said that there was no laundromat in the area. The problem was, several people I stopped assured me that the laundromat was not merely a figment of my imagination. Oh yes, there was definitely a laundromat in the neighborhood, they were certain they’d seen it, although they themselves had never used it. When I asked them exactly where it was, though, they would furrow their brows and begin to hem and haw.

"Next to the supermarket, the new one," said a middle-aged woman with shopping bags hanging from the bars of her pink moped. She had a page-boy haircut with a striking blue rinse and a toy poodle better groomed than I was stared up at me from the moped’s basket. The woman had stopped to talk to a couple, an elderly pair who looked as though they were out for a walk.

“No,” the elderly woman put in, “that’s a dry cleaner’s.”

Her male companion disagreed. “The dry cleaning place is next to the pharmacy.”

“That’s the old one,” the woman with the pageboy said. “And it’s not a dry cleaner’s anymore. It’s a pet shop now.”

“Ah. I’d heard they were going to sell. Wasn’t that Yonezawa’s place?”

I felt like jumping up and down and screaming. “Umm, the laundromat . . .?”

They all stared at me for a moment as though they’d forgotten why I was there, in their midst. The woman with the page-boy smiled indulgently. “Have you asked at the police box?”

“Where’s the police box?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. This was my day off! If the laundromat really didn’t exist, I'd find some warm, quiet place and have a cup of coffee. I’d need a break if I was going to spend the rest of the day hand-washing clothes.

“Back that way,” the woman said, pointing in the direction I’d just been in. But my pack was heavy and I was loath to retrace my steps.

Just as I was telling myself that wearing dirty jeans for the next week wouldn’t be the end of the world, a young woman approached me. She looked about my age, but more tired and careworn, and she seemed distracted.

“Do you need help?” she asked shyly.

“Yes! I’ve been trying to find the laundromat.”

She wrinkled her brow. “I don’t know where it is, but I’ve got a map of the neighborhood at home.”

I was tempted to say I would ask at the police box – they were bound to know there, after all – but I decided to go with her, reasoning that her apartment was probably closer. I was relieved to know she had a map of the neighborhood: almost all Japanese neighborhoods have a map that not only shows you the name and location of every business, but the names of each resident. The trick is finding a neighborhood map when you need it. In some neighborhoods, they are handily posted where a poor lost soul can find them; in others, they are craftily concealed and only the locals can point then out. Japanese streets are generally not named; cities and towns are divided into areas, sub-areas, and blocks. Houses and apartments in each sub-area are not geographically numbered, as new units are constantly being built between old lots, and finding your way around in a strange neighborhood can be hellish. You have to pity Japanese postmen; after only a few months in Japan, I certainly did.

Unfortunately, the woman’s house was at least half a kilometre away, through a warren of dark, meandering little side streets. She walked fast, as though she were in a hurry to get home. Already tired and weighed down by my heavy pack, I had to struggle to keep up with her.

“Here we are,” she said at last, in front of a small, shabby house in a housing tract. “Come on in!”

Stepping through the door, I could smell the freshly-mown grass smell of new tatami coupled with sour milk and unwashed clothes. Looking around, you got the feeling that whoever lived there was very busy. I heard a baby crying, and when I looked in the direction of the noise I saw a child barely old enough to walk come toddling towards us, arms outstretched. The woman stooped down and picked him up.

“This is Gen, my little boy! Gen say hello to the nice lady!”

I stared at Gen. A stream of yellow-green snot ran from his nose straight down to his chin. He stared back at me uncertainly from his mother’s arms and hiccoughed, still whimpering. I looked to see who had been caring for him in his mother’s absence, but there seemed to be no one else around.

The woman seemed in no hurry to go and look for the neighborhood map. She gave Gen a kiss and joggled him a bit to get him to stop crying.

I couldn’t help it, I just had to ask. I pointed to Gen and said “Hitori de?” There was probably a better way of asking if her baby had been left alone in the house, but I didn’t know how else to say it.

She nodded, misinterpreting my “all alone?” to mean ‘Are you by yourself.’ She juggled Gen in her arms again and said to me, “His father is in America,” as though that explained everything.

“Oh,” I said as though I understood – even though I didn’t.

“He is American,” she added.

“Oh!” I looked at Gen, and suddenly realized he was Eurasian. I didn’t know what to say. She was stuck here with the baby, poor kid, but her husband was back in America. I wondered how long he’d been gone and when he was coming back. “What state is your husband from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She bit her lips. “And he is not my husband.”

Uh oh.

I held Gen while his mother went to look for the neighborhood map, but he wasn’t having any of it. “Mama!” he wailed fitfully, his arms stretched out towards her.

I tried jiggling him about the way his mother had done. “Gen, Gen! Look out the window there!” I positioned him so that he could see the birds in one of the trees outside, but he strained away from me. “Mama!”

“Um…I think he wants you!”

“Oh, he always wants me,” his mother called from the next room. “You always want me, don’t you Gen?” She had the map now, I was relieved to see, and was beginning to open it.

“Would you like me to look at the map instead?” I hazarded, juggling Gen on my hip and trying to make myself heard above his screams. Poor little Gen had a streaming cold, it seemed. God knew what he’d been doing all by himself in the house before we arrived, but it hadn’t been wiping his own nose.

“No, no, I’ll look – but if you could just hold him for me while I do . . .” She opened the map and started looking for the Laundromat.

Part of me was relieved. Maps are a challenge for me even when they’re written in English, and I found Japanese maps even more confusing. But hanging onto Gen was getting tricky: he didn’t like being parked with a stranger. He’d been waiting for his mother to come home, but her attention was elsewhere. Agitated, he squirmed and fidgeted and strained away from me and I wondered why I was supposed to hold him when he'd obviously been ranging freely about the house before his mother got back.

Gen now began to struggle fiercely, and I had to put him down. He toddled off to his mother, arms outstretched. “Mama, mama, mama!”

I’m not sure how long it took Gen’s mother to scan the map and find that there was no laundromat indicated anywhere on it. Five minutes? Ten? It felt like a lot longer. I began to feel panicky. I was never going to get my clothes washed! “Maybe I should just go and ask at the police box . . .?” I said, eyeing the door longingly.

At first she insisted that it would be there on the map – it had to be. She’d find it – it was just a matter of looking. Finally, though, she gave up. Gen was hanging on to her leg and wailing for all he was worth, crying to be picked up, to be noticed, to be loved.

“I don’t understand it,” she murmured, “I’m positive there used to be one next to the pharmacy in the old mall.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the former dry cleaner’s was now a pet shop. “That’s okay,” I said, desperate to leave. “They’ll know where it is at the police box. I probably should have asked there to begin with.”

“Yes,” she said a little sadly, “they’re bound to know at the police box.”

She picked up Gen and jiggled him on one hip. “You wouldn’t want a cup of coffee, would you?”

I could see past her into her tiny kitchen, the sink piled high with unwashed dishes. I was dying for a cup of coffee, but I wanted to be anywhere else but there. “No, but thanks.”

Stepping back into my shoes in the entrance-way and shouldering my backpack, I turned to wave goodbye to her and Gen. It suddenly struck me that I didn’t even know her name.

“Come back and visit us any time!” she called out, shaking Gen’s little wrist lightly so that his hand flopped back and forth. “We’re always here! Aren’t we Gen-gen? We never go anywhere!”

I smiled and waved. I had no intention of visiting again. But to this day I wish I had.

Getting There -- Eventually

I have no sense of direction.

Now, when I say that, some might imagine that I simply have trouble finding my way places. That is certainly true: I have an awful time just getting from A to B. But my direction problem is so severe that you really have to see me in action to believe it. I'm not bragging and I'm not complaining; I'm just stating a fact. Even if I've been to a particular place over a dozen times, the odds are that I'd never be able to find my way there on my own. And even if by some miracle I did manage this, I'd never be able to find my way back.

I've been like this from the get-go, and the one thing I will say for this problem is that it does help you have interesting adventures. When I was just a toddler, I got lost after playing in my grandfather's front yard in Stockton. I couldn't remember which house his was, so I went to the neighbors' instead and walked in on a very lively party in full swing. The neighbors were quite taken with me and invited me in. One woman lifted me high over her head, then handed me to someone else. I got passed around the room and I still remember wondering what the hell was going on and what was so funny, as I sailed from smiling face to smiling face. Eventually one of the more sober revelers took me back to my grandfather's house next door, but it was an interesting two or three minutes.

I also got lost going home from school during my third week at kindergarten (we lived approximately one and a half blocks away from the school). I ended up at the house of a very nice family many blocks away from the school. They all spoke Spanish, which I found intriguing, and they had crucifixes on the walls; one of the little girls there was named Maria and she invited me to come over and play whenever I liked. Maria shared some chocolate gold coins with me, and Maria's mother had to get our telephone number from the directory and call my mother to come and get me; I blush to remember it. Sadly, I could not take Maria up on her offer to go and play with her: try as I might, I could not remember where she lived.

In Japan, I got lost on a regular basis and quickly learned how to ask for directions in about two dozen ways. I also learned that I could not trust anyone who couldn't immediately tell me the way. The minute someone frowned and started wondering if the the place I was looking for really was the second turning after the acupuncture clinic, past the temple and down the side road towards the second graveyard, I knew that I needed to find another person to tell me the way. I lived in Japan for seventeen years, and I'll bet that I spent a good six months of that time trying to find my way somewhere. But it did wonders for my Japanese, and besides, walking is great exercise.

Of course, I can laugh about it now and make light of the fact that I have this particular handicap, and yet there have been times that I have wept from frustration. Why oh why oh why, I have silently cried, was I given this particular defective brain with this vast, yawning desert where normal people have neat little grids -- built-in direction finders like those devices you can now get in cars that show you exactly where you are and where you ought to go?

I'm not sure when I stopped shaking my fists at the sky and learned acceptance, but I am now at peace with myself. The problem is not going to go away; like my eye color or height, it is an inherent part of me, and like it or hate it, it's here to stay. I now make a virtue of a necessity and tell myself that the quest is more important than the goal, the journey more important than the eventual destination. In fact, I want that on my tombstone:

SHE COULDN'T FIND HER WAY HALF THE TIME, BUT SHE HAD A LOT OF FUN TRYING TO GET THERE