The Gift

As a young man, I enjoyed a nearly perfect sense of direction. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I could tell within ten degrees on a compass which direction I was facing. Not everyone my age had this gift. Its display was even met with envy at times. I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was nice to be good at something.

The gods, however, award such gifts grudgingly. My internal compass began to fade in my 30s, and has long since shut down entirely. Built-in obsolescence, I suppose.

Without that factory-installed compass, I am lost. This is wholly unfair. Mature men need it more than young men, for the young are much more adept at faking it.

My wife has watched this erosion (and happily complained about it) for years. It used to be that I knew which way to turn and she didn’t. This was immensely satisfying. Men, you see, must be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times so as to pounce on any approaching threat.

Naturally, the angst of the missus grew inversely proportionate to my fading sense of direction. The worse it got, the more she dutifully pointed it out. Thanks, babe.

For awhile, I could blame cloudy skies or nighttime for obscuring the sun by which I navigated. That argument survived for about three days.

At length, one of my sons – acutely aware of the crisis – bought me one of those GPS things. Voila! I installed it at once, carefully licking the suction cup on the windshield mount and planting it, just so. It had a for-real compass built in! Screw the cloudy skies! Screw the dark of night! Problem solved!

The gods must have been amused by this. For sport, they inflicted near-record heat on Texas summers. The defenseless GPS began falling off the windshield, clanging right onto the steering column and scaring the crap out of me and the missus.

There are some things one absolutely should not attempt while driving, such as grabbing one’s crotch to protect the boys from incoming.

Only slightly less dangerous is driving while attempting to affix a GPS mount to the inside of a windshield. While steering with both knees to keep the hands free for the task. And at night. And (naturally), while trying to remember directions to an unfamiliar address which you expected to find easily because you had this GPS but which from this moment forward stands not for Global Position System but instead for ***-damned Piece of ****.

I wonder what we did with that old street map . . .