Tales From Exit 22 by Al Batt

The fellow driving ahead of me was keeping an eye on the crops.

I understand. Who knows where the crops might wander off to if we didn’t keep an eye on them?

He was a part of the neighborhood watch program. He was obligated to keep an eye on wily weeds. A constant vigil is necessary.

He was meandering like a failed science project. A mosey that was conserving the tires on his truck.

I didn’t know him, but I liked him. In this mad rush that we all find ourselves in, he’d carved out a pace that allowed him to lose the hurry. He took the time to look and to notice things despite a world that seemed to want to pass him. It sometimes appears that the law of the road is that you must pass the vehicle ahead of you or be subject to fines and suspensions. He embraced the direction he was headed for as long as he kept it company.

Every direction has something to recommend it. North, south, east and west. Northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, over, under, sideways and everything in between. Up and down. Don’t tell an elevator that up and down aren’t directions.

We like traveling north and south. Those directions make it sound as if a big adventure is involved. A married couple had often talked of visiting Alaska and Costa Rica. Money was the problem. That and the husband’s shiftlessness. The wife began buying lottery tickets regularly.

One day, she came home and said excitedly, “I won the lottery. Alaska and Costa Rica, here I come! Pack your bags.”

Her husband asked, “Should I pack for Alaska or Costa Rica?”

“I don’t care,” she replied. “Just pack your bags and get out!”

People have become famous for giving directional advice. Horace Greeley wrote, “So many people ask me what they shall do; so few tell me what they can do. Yet this is the pivot wherein all must turn. I believe that each of us who has his place to make should go where men are wanted, and where employment is not bestowed as alms. Of course, I say to all who are in want of work, go West!”

Some researchers argue that John L. Soule of Terre Haute, Indiana wrote the famous words attributed to Greeley, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.”

Now that Florida is our third most populous state, someone must be advising, “Go to Florida, old man.”

As if we didn’t have enough things to worry about, now we have to worry about having more Floridians.

Once, when I wondered aloud what I should do, I was given the advice, “Pick a direction.”

My mother had a faulty built-in GPS. No matter what direction she headed, to my mother it was north. She moved from Iowa to Minnesota even though Grandma insisted that there was no need to move north. She reasoned that Iowa winters were bad enough without traveling north to find worse.

Even directionless people are headed in one direction or another. Humans make notoriously poor compasses. On the very same day, one person will say that this country is headed in the wrong direction while another will maintain that the country is headed in the right direction. These statements are made with a certainty that allows no recalibration. Maybe they both are right. Or wrong.

It’s not hard to find a direction. There is always someone who is more than willing to tell you where to go.

Robert Frost wrote, “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Before the GPS became a common thing, I occasionally stopped and asked for directions. I didn’t tell anyone that I had done so. Asking directions wasn’t a manly thing to do. The most common reply I received when asking for directions was, “You can’t get there from here.”

The best counsel, might have come from a grease and oil-covered mechanic, who when asked what was the quickest way to a venue, asked in return, “Are you on foot or in a car?”

I told him that I was behind the wheel of an automobile.

He nodded and said, “That’s the quickest.”

We are terrible at directions. Most of us could get lost in a phone booth if we could find a phone booth.

We are the reason that directions have to be put on a bottle of shampoo.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.