The other day my husband got a phone call from our daughter, Clementine. “Where am I?” she asked him tersely as soon as he answered the phone. Had it been me who answered the phone I would have been stumped. Was this the lead in to a joke? An existential crisis? A demand to be recognized as a unique individual in a unique time and place in history? My husband, however, chose to take the literal route and asked her to describe where she was. Which turned out to be the right answer, because Clementine was, in fact, lost.
Again.
Not spiritually lost, not emotionally lost, but just the usual, good old boring version of lost. The kind of lost, apparently, that thinks it’s okay to call someone up who is nowhere near you and ask them to tell you where they are. I should have gotten this, because it is the exactly the same thing Clementine did to me last Christmas.
When she was in London.
Yes, that’s right, my daughter called me from London to ask me for directions. At first I was flattered that, even though I’ve only been to London a few times in my life she thought I was enough of a Londoner to find the quickest route across Hyde Park. Or maybe that I was enough of a hacker that I could break into London’s massive CCTV network and tell her to “turn down that alley the man and his poodle just came out of.” Alas, I knew her well enough to know that it was neither: it wasn’t that she thought I was special—she just knew that I would answer my phone.
At one AM. Because that’s what time people who are lost in London call you. (To be fair, it was nine AM somewhere—like London.) Regardless, I pulled out my laptop, loaded up Google maps and talked her through finding the nearest Tube station. And I wasn’t even too terribly snarky about the whole thing. After all, I know how frustrating it can be to try and navigate your way around big cities—especially big cities whose streets were laid out before the invention of pants.
Of course then she turned around and did the exact same thing to me when she got back home to Flagstaff. The city she was born in. In fact, she did it to me from downtown Flagstaff, the same ten block area she has lived in her whole life. And a part of the city that was laid out well after the invention of pants, which means that not only are the streets laid out in a handy grid pattern, they are even partially alphabetical.
Not that I needed to know the alphabet to direct her: apparently, what I needed instead was my own satellite, because when Clementine called to ask me, again, where she was, she prefaced the question with the words, “I’m in front of a white building with blue shutters: where am I?”
I know downtown Flagstaff pretty well, but not that well.
I tried asking her the name of the street she was on: no dice. Asking her which side of the railroad tracks only got me the answer “this side.” Finally I got down to basics: can you see a great big mountain anywhere? Is it in front of you or behind you?
I finally managed to direct her to where she was going after breaking the instructions down into “Dora the Explorer” sized chunks. “Go towards the big mountain, over the train tracks, and turn right at the talentless dread-locked busker.” (I don’t need a satellite to know who’s likely to be in front of the Pita Pit—and I’m pretty sure that if anyone should be having an existential crisis, it’s that guy.)