GPS for Masochists

Auntie has glaucoma in her left eye. When this is brought up in conversation (usually by her) she is quick to add that “it's not a normal glaucoma”. Then she proceeds to tell a lengthy story about being bundled up during chilly October weather, a visitor at the door, and secondhand information from a Canadian nose doctor fifteen years later. The story does not make a huge amount of sense, and is usually met by medical professionals with bewilderment.

Regardless of how it came to be, her vision has been deteriorating steadily in the past few decades and she is no longer capable of seeing out of her left eye at all. Despite this, her driver's license is still valid in the state of Massachusetts and up until the stroke she was still driving around. She was fortunate that her home is less than a five minute drive from a grocery store and pharmacy, and had very little need to travel further. She had routes memorized to all her regular destinations in town. But, as Raz and I would soon realize, all these routes revolved around almost never making any left turns.

I am not great with directions. When it takes some people as little as two trips to a certain destination to have the route memorized, I could still be confused and lost after the fiftieth. My parents bought me a GPS for my 23rd birthday and I use it almost every day. But I had been working in Framingham for almost a whole year before we moved in with Auntie. I can't pretend that I had the whole layout of the town mapped out in my brain, but I was familiar enough with major place and street names to navigate the area without inducing panic. I was confident in my ability to take Auntie anywhere she would need to go without relying too heavily on my beloved GPS.

Our first trip driving Miss Auntie was taking her home from the rehab facility. She was relatively quiet since the route we took was somewhat unfamiliar to her, coupled with the fact that she was thrilled to be returning home after what she undoubtedly considered “too long”. She remained in her house for most of her first week back, as dictated by the visiting nurse service, until she blindsided me by demanding to be taken to an appointment with her hairdresser. At 8 o'clock in the morning. Needless to say, I was super stoked.

Though we had only been with her a short time, I was already concerned with Auntie's memory and thus didn't want to rely on her guidance to locate the hair salon. After a quick google search, I found the place and memorized the route from our home easily – three right turns, and one dreaded left.

Getting her out of the house and into the car takes approximately eight minutes, nine if its too rainy or too sunny.  She has multiple pairs of special, eye insulating, UV ray protecting sun glasses that are so dark that she can’t actually see through them once she has them on, and needs to be guided by looking at my feet as I walk away from her.  Her car is also full of umbrellas, but she claims they are unreliable.  “I don’t trust them,” she’ll say, as she twists her wrinkly sourpuss of a face towards the overcast sky.  “Go to the basement and get one of the umbrellas hanging there.”  I do not understand why she chooses to fill her car with broken umbrellas, rather than throw them out, and to keep all her functional ones hanging in a basement.  But that is a story for another time.

With Auntie in the car, I pulled out of the driveway and made the first right turn onto our street.  So far so good.  “You know where we’re going?” she croaked.  I told her I did, and she seemed temporarily satisfied with that.  A few blocks from her home, we passed her local pharmacy.  “That’s where I get to go to pick up my medicines,” she pointed out.

“I know, I just picked up your new prescriptions yesterday.”

“Oh, did you now?”

I did.  Where did she think her pills had come from?  (Or the receipt for pills that she had reimbursed me, for that matter)  We came to the second right turn, marked by a flower shop.  “Mary Ellen used to get flowers there.” Auntie said as we drove past.  I do not know a Mary Ellen, but I didn’t ask.  That is Auntie’s way - calling people by their first name during a non-sequitor and expecting the listener, not matter how distant an acquaintance, to be on a first name basis with all the people who interest her enough to tell stories about them.

She was just finishing telling me about how the factory on our right that processed metal screws used to be a grocery store (questionable fact), when I got in a ‘left turn only’ lane and prepared to make our one and only left turn.  She sat up straighter in her seat, mid-sentence, and shouted “Careful now, the light is still red!”

“I know, Auntie.  I’m not just going to dart into the street.”

She eyed me suspiciously.  I think she thought I would.  It was a long red light, and she spent most of our wait pointed out that if I just pulled into the next lane over she could show me how to get to her hair dresser’s another way.  A way that I now realize most likely avoided this panic-inducing left turn.  I can understand how driving must be nerve wracking for her, but it was an intersection with minimal traffic and lights to indicate when we had the right of way.  I was not particularly concerned.  When the light finally turned green, I could see her grit her teeth as we looped across two lanes of traffic and over to the rightmost lane to take another final turn straight into the salon parking lot.  There was no need to go around, no need to make our trip longer.  But she was shaken none the less.

She spent just over an hour at the salon, getting the crinkled remains of short grey hairs wrapped into curlers and grousing over the poor selection of magazines she does not read.  I thought that a little beautification might placate her, but no.  As soon as we were back in the car she started her complaints.

In parking lots, it is my habit to drive around, rather than through, lanes of parking spaces - occupied or not.  It is something that I adapted after an unfortunate low-speed accident years ago, little more than a scrape and some annoyances, but I learned that the lines are painted there for a reason and so I follow them.  Auntie probably can’t see the lines, and even if she can she really doesn’t give much of a fuck.  So when I pulled out of our parking space and began traveling up the length of our row, she immediately began to panic once more.  “The way out is over there!” she shouted, pointing a finger across my plane of vision towards the clearly marked exit to our left.

“I can see it, Auntie.  That’s the way we came in.”

“But you’re not pointed at it.”

“I’m following the rules of the road.  We’ll get there.”

“God help us, there are cars coming!”

“Auntie.  I know the way home.  It’s fine.”

She glowered at me and shrank back in her seat.  Yes, there were cars.  Parked.  On the other side of the parking lot.  The shopping plaza we were driving through was generally not a hopping social scene, especially before 9AM.  I pulled around the edge of the lot and took a careful (left, gasp!) turn towards home.  After a few moments of sulking, she picked up the narration of her tour of local landmarks (“That’s the house where Jim’s grandmother lived.  She used to see his grandfather across the way.”), which I should point out that I have heard verbatim every Friday morning since then.

But her road phobias are hardly limited to measly left turns.

The area around our house has been plagued with construction.  Two local bridges are out of commission for the summer, as the town is in a mad dash to bring them up to code before school comes back into session and the buses will need both bridges in their pickup routes.  Traveling through the detours doesn’t bother me on my own, but when Auntie is in the car she prefers that we avoid them altogether.  The construction equipment, I think, makes her nervous.  That, and she hates waiting for what she deems as “no good reason”.

One morning, she had spent the better part of two hours begging both Raz and I (separately, of course, to increase the odds that one of us would crack) to take her to the bank.  She has multiple bank accounts, and struggled to articulate to either one of us which bank she desired a trip to.  I agreed, finally, and began the twenty minute process of loading her up into the car.  

It is important to note that, of her two main banks, one is reached by turning left out of our street and one by turning right.  I had already made the right hand turn before Auntie suddenly realized that she wanted to go to the other bank.  Thinking quickly (and frankly, I’m still a bit surprised that I managed it), I turned onto a side street that I recognized as a route to avoid both the construction and reorient us towards her other bank.  She had never driven down this street, so immediately she went into panic mode.  

“Where are you going?” she barked.  

“If you want to go to the other bank, this is the street I have to take,” I calmly replied.

“But you don’t know where we are!”

“Auntie, just because you don’t know where we are doesn’t mean I don’t know.”

She paused for a moment, then changed tactics to criticizing my immediate driving skills rather than my choice or route.  “You’re too close to that trash can.”  “Another car is coming up behind you, watch out.”  And my personal favorite “Be careful of that bird in the tree over there.”

Instead of answer her, I just took it.  It wasn’t worth it to argue with her, and if she made me mad I was all the more apt to crash the car into that tree - careful of the bird or not.  

We reached the end of the street, which intersected another main road that was prominently marked with both a street sign and a large red right hand arrow with the universal symbol for “no”.  Not only was this street one that I thought she would recognize, as it was a major road a mere block away from the location of her bank, but this particular street was memorable as it bore bother her maiden name and my current last name.  Living down the street from “Hardy Road” for forty years, one would think she had seen it before.

But no, she was still in panic mode.  Despite being a foot away from the “Hardy Road” sign and the “No Right Turn” sign on the passenger side of the car, Auntie had no idea what was going on.  I turned on my left blinker and edged into the street, checking and double checking traffic on both sides of the car (note: nobody was coming, even in the distance, not that it mattered to Auntie).  Auntie gripped the sides of the car in a panic and shouted “What are you doing?!”

“I’m turning left.”

“Well you can’t!”

“Why not.  Nobody is coming.”

“It says ‘No left turn’!”

“That’s a ‘No RIGHT turn’ sign.”

“No it isn’t!  I can see it and you can’t!”

I had no idea how to deal with this.  She had been difficult before, but this is the first time she had flat out denied that information right in front of her face was true.  I could have taken the time to stop the car, get out, point to the sign, and explain the nature of left versus right.  Raz says he would have, had he been in my situation.  But he has more patience than I do, and I just wanted this trip to be over with.  Ignoring her cawing, I turned left and pulled smoothly into the bank parking lot less than a minute later.  

Her trip inside was brief, merely to check her account balance and to add to her collection of those paper tubes you store coins in.  I made sure to take a more ‘appropriate’ route on the way home, but I’m pretty sure she had already forgotten the whole thing.

One day in July, Auntie had asked Raz to take her to the Oreck store to have her vacuum cleaner inspected. There was nothing wrong with the vacuum, but she had a 10 year service plan and had it taken in to be cleaned and serviced (whatever it means to service a vacuum cleaner) every year. Raz knew exactly where he was going and how to get there, but Auntie wanted him to drive the route she knew, convinced he actually did not know how to get to the Oreck store. Not wanting to sit in her cloud of misery, Raz went her way, which was unsurprisingly full of right turns through the back roads of Framingham; adding a needless 20 minutes to their journey. There was a straight route to the store from the house, but that involved a main road and Auntie is not a main road traveler.

As Raz drove through the plaza where the Oreck store was located there was a bit of a traffic jam at one of the parkinglot’s intersection. This intersection also happened to be in perfect line with the parking aisle located directly in front of the plaza. Wanting to avoid this traffic jam, Raz saw an opportunity to go around it and get to an available, close-by parking space just in front of the Oreck store (keep in mind we are still waiting for a handicap placard) so he took the opportunity and went around. He had barely gone two feet before Auntie started SCREAMING at him at the top of her half working lungs “No! You’ve gone too far! You’ve gone too far! Where are you going? It’s over there! You’ve gone too far!”

Raz calmly, but quickly said, “Auntie, those cars in front of us, they were stuck, we’re driving around them to get to the store quicker.”

“Well you’ve gone too far.”

“You’re right, Auntie, I did. Next time I’ll drive into the back of the car in front of me, that should get them to move faster.”

“Yeah, I’d say so.” she replied.

Initially Raz thought she was joking. She wasn’t.

I thought about the way Auntie chooses to “navigate” us through the side streets of our town, longing for the droning guidance of my vaguely British robotic co-pilot.  It made me wonder what it would be like to record Auntie’s voice for a GPS.  Instead of my familiar “in point-two miles, turn right onto Lexington Avenue”, one could be treated to a hazy “that building there used to be a post office, but it burnt down.  Janie’s grandmother used to go there to buy stamps.   Should you turn right back there?”  It could be quite entertaining if you don’t intend to get it where you’re going.  But then I think of the imperative, almost accusatory tone my GPS takes when it announces that its “recalculating” and imagine it replaced with the shrill panic of Auntie’s “God help us, you’ve gone too far!  TOO FAR!”

I’m not sure I could take it.