Getting Lost

I must admit I have a poor sense of direction,  but luckily my husband has a very good one,  and he seldom gets us lost.   And on the rare occasions we do get lost,  he’s willing to stop and ask directions,  unlike my rather stubborn father.  (See 17 Gas Stations)

But I remember a time,  well before GPS,   when we got lost with no gas station or any sign of civilization in sight,  and our glove box full of road maps no help as we didn’t know where we were.

Our son was very young then and was strapped in his car seat in the back while up front my husband and I were having a marital dispute.  I was accusing him of having made the wrong turn that got us lost in the first place,

Then we heard the kid pipe up from the back.

”How can we be lost?”,   he asked,  “We’re all together!”

– Dana Susan Lehrman 

I do not have a good sense of direction. I'm usually good with maps, unless I have them upside down. And grateful now to have GPS.
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We were put on a bus, blindfolded, and driven around country roads this way and that.  At some point, groups of four were let out of the bus, given a map, and told to find our way back.  We were all fifth graders in East Lansing public school and this was part of the curriculum for our week at Clear Lake Camp–an exciting and scary prospect for newbies like me.  The blind drop-off was perhaps the most daunting.

At last it was our turn.  My group of four stood apprehensively, abandoned in the middle of the dusty road, with an unmarked T intersection not far away and only woods and fields in sight. I looked at the map, and the solution seemed impossibly simple.  If we just turned at the intersection, the road would lead us directly back to camp, maybe half a mile away.  No one else had a better idea, so we followed my suggestion and were the first ones back.

Maybe that wasn’t much of a challenge, but over the years I have thanked whatever mix of genetics and evolution makes it possible to carry locations in my brain.  Of course there is help from the position of the sun and visual landmarks like mountains and water, although I wouldn’t want to challenge a migrating bird or butterfly.  Maps also help.

I feel an almost physical need to know where, geographically, I am–and for that matter, genealogically, metaphysically, astronomically and relationship-wise. Maybe it has something to do with a sense of control over the vastness of existence.  One of the first things I want when traveling is a map, and I probably qualify as a “cartophile”.  Everything from hand-drawn sketches to ancient maps of the world, from historic ordinance maps of England and Scotland to globes with past and future solar eclipses–the number of maps in my house is ridiculous. We once bought another suitcase to cart home a large atlas of maps from the 1600’s.  The automobile associations also put out wonderful maps, as do local tourist services.  Although Google and car GPS have forever changed how we access geography and directions, there is still nothing like a good old-fashioned map at the right scale with the critical information.

Pre-GPS, Sally and I were driving from the Sierra Nevada to the Bay Area as night fell.  We were on some backroads, crossing the Central Valley, confident as we sped through the little towns toward I-5.  Maybe we were talking.  There were a few turns here and there, but we were both comfortably on the right road heading west, although it seemed that I-5 was elusively far.  Suddenly, Sally asked if that little bar with the neon sign that we passed on the right didn’t look a lot like the one we passed on the left a half hour earlier?  We tried to look at a map in the dim car light, tried to look for stars overhead, but it was clear that our inner maps were both 180 degrees off and we were steadfastly headed east.  The more smug you are in your orientation, the harder it is to recalibrate.  And how could we both have had our sense of direction fail us so?  We were humbled.

In the end, we are not in as much control as we might like to think we are.  But maybe that is why it is so satisfying when you set a course and actually end up at your goal.

As long as I know where the lake is, I know I am headed east.
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For three weeks I lay immobilized...
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Although I don’t look forward to going to the dentist, I do appreciate the importance of the work–maybe because I have always had dental issues, from cavities to crowns, partial plates and bridges to implants, orthodontia to tooth extraction.  Much of it is thanks to genetics, which forgot to provide me a full secondary set of teeth and even now has left a few baby teeth hanging on by a thread.  I envy those with naturally beautiful teeth but have been fortunate to be able to get dental care to make the best of the situation.

When I worked in the community health centers in Alameda County, it was a great source of pride that we included dental care services—of course cobbled together with great difficulty through grants and special programs.  In fact, my clinic ended up taking over the dental services at the local children’s hospital because it was such a money-loser for them, and we could leverage other resources.  I learned about how preventive care for children could change lives, and how poor dentition could affect overall physical and emotional health at all ages.  Heart disease, diabetes control and poor pregnancy outcomes have all been linked to oral health;  trying to find job or a relationship with diseased and absent teeth is a real challenge.  And yet dental care is at best an “add-on” for most health systems, and very expensive to access. Nothing establishes your social standing as visibly as bad teeth.

There are historical reasons why medical, dental, eye, maternity, public health and mental health services evolved in their silos, but it is pretty clear that true health is more holistic than that (and includes the “social determinants of health”).  In my utopian fever dreams, there is no doubt that everyone would get the dental care they need.

We were looking for somewhere to buy a boom box to play CD music for our elopement ceremony in Niagara Falls, and someone suggested Canadian Tire.  Incredulous, we had to ask why an automotive service center would have such a thing and were met with an amused look and explanation that the store carried much more than tires.  And indeed, it had apparently morphed into a big box with garden center, sports equipment, kitchen items, furniture, cleaning supplies, seasonal items, and electronics. They also gave us Canadian Tire dollars with each purchase.

The dollars sported the face of a man with moustache and plaid tam, connoting a thrifty Scot (google tells me he was “Sandy McTire”).  They came in small denominations of a few cents up to a dollar, a tiny fraction of the value of your purchase. They were accepted like cash at the store and might add up if you spent a lot.  Once we moved to Canada, we had a place on top of the microwave that accumulated small stacks of these dollars, which we generally failed to redeem, and turned out to be not worth as much as we hoped anyway.

One day at checkout, I got no Sandy McTire money.  Instead, I was offered a plastic card that I only had to activate and it would magically store all my rewards.  It was the 21^st century after all.  I took the plastic and groused to myself about the death of cash, the tracking of every purchase, the targeted advertising, the information my phone gives constantly, the loss of privacy.  I still remember COINTELPRO, know of the evils of power and distrust big data.

And so, in my own quixotic way, and not that it makes any rational difference, I have never activated that card.

Laughing Gas and the Chestnut Tree

When I was growing up we lived on a shady street in the Bronx.   Several doctors and dentists had offices on our block and my dad was one of them.   He was a GP who practiced on the ground floor of our three-story house and we lived on the two upper floors  “over the store”.   (See The Puppy in the Waiting Room and The Corpse in the Office)

For many years a dentist named Ben rented space in my dad’s office.  Ben was a wonderfully kind and gentle man,  and he and his wife Eleanor became my folks’ lifelong friends,  and Ben of course became our family dentist.

Then at some point Ben took a larger office down the street in a house with a beautiful chestnut tree in the front yard.

One day when I was 9 or 10 I went down the block to Ben’s office for my dental appointment and he told me I had a cavity – my first!   He said he’d give me laughing gas to relax me while he filled it.

Laughing gas sounded like fun and I sat still while his nurse put a mask over my nose.   Then Ben told me to lie back in the chair and look out the window at the chestnut tree.

I did,  and Ben filled that first cavity.

Ben was my dentist until I moved out of my parents’ house,  and over the years I’ve had a few others.  All of them have been nice guys and fine dentists  –  but none gave me laughing gas,  or had a beautiful chestnut tree I could see from the dental chair.

And none will ever be as dear to me as Ben.

– Dana Susan Lehrman