I am extremely fond of this poem for a few reasons. The first is that this is exactly the way I give directions. Instead of providing street names or anything that might call a compass to mind, I say, "You go for a little while down that one street -- you know the one we were on that time we met for lunch and you got the French toast?"
The second reason is that it reminds me I am not alone in this method of explaining how to get from here to there. People in small towns often do this kind of directing, too. Oh, yes, they also make use of those maddening terms, "North" and "South" and so on, but they often use rural landmarks that, when I first encountered them, seemed both foreign and familiar.
I'm remembering, with greater affection than I actually felt at the time, the first year we lived in western Nebraska. Some new friends invited us to dinner at their home. Atticus and I had been married about five years when we moved "out west," where Atticus took a teaching job. We had no children, and no intention of having them. But in the two years that we lived in what I sometimes called, ironically, a God-forsaken town, I was being transformed into a Christian (I had nothing to do but read the Bible, you see, and that's such a chancy proposition for an atheist) and even, imperceptibly, into someone who might want to become a mother, though I didn't know that any of my experiences there would lead me to where I am now. All I knew was that I wanted life to stop hurting (though, yes, that was a pipe dream, and life still hurts sometimes when one is a Catholic, but I perceive hurts -- both the enormous and the petty ones -- differently than I used to; pain and suffering have a different meaning now.)
Anyway, living in that tiny, isolated town, when our new friends -- the onion farmer and his wife, the English teacher -- invited us to dinner, we received directions that sounded like this: "You head down the highway and go past the second pile of sugar beets and take a left ...." I knew that I could be friends with these people. They understood how I needed to understand how to get from here to there.
And because getting from here to there is rarely easy, and is generally fraught with the unexpected, the sublime, the sad, the unforgettable, the delightful, the metaphorical and lingering memories, I have arrived at the final reason I love this poem: its truth and poignancy. And, of course, for its mention of Bach, for whom I'm a pushover.
So, head down this page, and take a turn into the poem. Stop for a moment and look around. If you drive straight through, you might want to double back and retrace your steps; enjoy the scenery for just a bit. Look for the sugar beets. And for the tiny tweaks that reinvent a heart. Watch for that place we met that time for lunch.
Travel Directions
by Joan I. Siegel
There ought to be a word
for the way you know how to get some place
but don't remember the names of streets
the number of turns and blinking yellow lights
so that if someone asked
you really couldn't say
except you know the road starts out straight
and when it's sunny the branches blink across
the windshield making you want to rub your eyes
then the road turns sharply uphill past a red barn
where a black dog jumps out to race you for a quarter mile
and finally recedes in the mirror like a disappointment
and you remember the road dips downhill
into the shadows of the morning
where you hear Bach's unaccompanied 'cello
....
~~~~~~
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