I can get lost anywhere. Not only in my head while working on a story, but in the physical world. You’ve heard that old saying, her left hand doesn’t know what her right hand is doing? That’s not my problem, I’m quite aware of my right hand and my left hand. North, South, East and West, now they’re the problem.
I got a GPS for Christmas, a bit of gadget wizardry that makes my life much easier, although more crowded. Now, instead of a single voice in my head pointing out directions for a story, there’s a second voice in my car pointing out directions for a destination point. It gets noisy.
The tiny woman who lives inside my GPS is British, and could get a job with MI5 if she decides to change career paths. She is very self-assured, very bossy, very calculating. She is constantly “recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.”
This missing layer of knowing, this state of being geographically challenged, runs in my family. My oldest brother recently confessed he gets lost all the time. I should have recognized the clues. When the graveside service for my mother had concluded, I climbed into the passenger seat of my brother’s car. In respect, mourners formed a queue of cars behind us to let the immediate family leave first, to follow us out of the cemetery. My brother led the cars in a slow circle right back to my mother’s grave.
Going in circles sometimes isn’t such a bad thing. When ending a story, I like to return to the site of the grave, so to speak, to somehow circle back to the beginning. Of course, something has always changed, usually within the main character, and the ending is not an exact duplicate of the beginning.
On a recent visit to the small town of Deep River, I went for an evening walk. After an hour, I realized I had passed the same yellow house, the same beautiful garden profuse with roses, at least three times. I was going in circles, when I had thought I was heading back in the direction of my lodgings.
My husband and I lived in Deep River when we were first married. We fled small-town life for big city life as soon as we could. I felt trapped in Deep River. I hated the prospect of living my whole life there. I vividly recall driving away for what I thought was the last time. Our baby girl slept in her car seat in the back, the birdcage carrying our zebra finches bunched in next to her.
All these years later, our baby girl is grown with a baby of her own on the way. For the past two summers, my husband and I have returned to Deep River on vacation. I fantasize about buying a small house there, passing the summers in a lovely haze of paddling and writing. The fantasy includes a writers’ retreat where others stay a while, create, read, regenerate. It is a place where going around in circles is acceptable, even encouraged, and Ms GPS has nothing to say, since there really isn’t anywhere to go.
I’ve come full circle.
_____
This blog entry was previously published on OpenBook Toronto.