WHICH WAY?
How good is your sense of direction?
That can be important, because we will have difficulty arriving anywhere if we don't know in which direction our goal. It just saves time, too.
I had a friend years ago who displayed a remarkable tendency of not knowing which way to turn. When we lived in a hotel, he turned away from the restaurant at which we took our meals. When he was driving to work, he very often turned the wrong direction once he arrived at curbside from the garage. Once around the block and he became oriented well enough to get to work with minimum of wasted time.
He was aware of his difficulty and used to justify it quite earnestly by pointing out that even birds such as the celebrated, highly honored homing pigeons, very often took off and flew a few experimental circles about the point of departure before heading off into the direction their journey demanded.. Contending that his habit was really one which displayed a sense of caution which assured him of a longer, safer life through the use of caution and a better, safer life because of this tendency he called a “trait” - while we said it was a “quirk”.
Now, looking back at it, I find that he may have been more advanced in much of his thinking and actions than we were ,and have been.
His peer group is pretty well gone by now, either moved away or died. He, himself, is resident in the local cemetery, largely because ,when he became the intended victim of a common killer disease, he took the wrong road to an effective cure.. Just this week some medical authorities issued a statement telling us why women live longer than do men.. They decided it was because a man almost automatically refused to see a doctor when one was needed, whereas the woman does do so with a mere suggestion that something may be amiss.
I''m, truly, a bit ashamed to admit that we called him ”Tardy” a nickname we felt he had earned by a lifetime of delays. That was a cruel thing for us to have done, I will admit, and while I am in such a confessional mood ,I will also attest to the fact in all fairness, that it was “Tardy”, among us all, who choose the most loving and lovable wife of all, it was “Tardy” who took time to be with his growing children as much as possible, it was “Tardy” who settled those little neighborhood disputes we had by not jumping to any conclusions before the problem developed.
It may well be that knowing where you are going is less important than what you plan to get done once you get there.
A.L.M. May 2, 2003 [c697wds]
