driving miss crazy

i was heading the wrong way up 41 yesterday with my babygirl in the backseat, the second time i've gone north in two weeks when i meant to be driving south.

last week i had my standing wednesday-night appointment, and I decided to run an errand on the way, but i ran into a problem when I got on I-575 at a particular entrance ramp i wasn't so used to. it wasn't until i was a good 20 miles north, when a view of the mountains jolted me like rap on the alarm clock at 6, that i snapped to and realized i had been heading north instead of south.

i mean i was past Canton, supposed to be in Dunwoody. Whoa.

Same thing yesterday, except on 41, and what made me turn wrong this time is that I stopped to get some cheese dip from the mexican restaurant near the Y where jenna and I had been swimming. If you know one thing about me it's that i get turned around really easily. So apparently when i turned out of the parking lot i mistook which way was 'home' and again went north instead of south. this time i realized it after about 10 minutes and said, "Jenna, do you recognize any of this stuff?"

She said, "Oh no, we're lost." she hates being lost. I told her no i just went the wrong way, and that's the second time mommy did that in a week--mommy's just nutty sometimes isn't she.

uturn.

the thing that got me this time was that after i headed the wrong way i passed by a parking lot at a funeral home where there was an obvious wake in progress, and i sing-sanged myself into the midst of it--doesn't take long--feeling what they were feeling, or not really, which is what the Tag Poetry below came from.

Because in passing by, i noticed two men standing near their cars talking, and one of them slapped the other on the back and i was passing by just long enough to see them laugh and glance the exchange--animated, positive.

so that got me thinking about death and someone inside the home dead, for sure, wondering who is that dead person. i think a woman is inside, older, these parking-lot men are her sons or grandsons or nephews, and i imagine them without her, i always do. i think how i have to pause and take a breath, someone else's dying knocks the wind out of me, i think what is that sound--oh that's the sound of someone not here anymore, that's the hum of absence, that is the space between 'is' and 'isn't' - if i could i would build an entire world in that eternal silence and i would name it Loss.

and that is about the time i realized i was headed north, not south.

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