Not Exactly Dancing in the Dark

I haven’t seen one of them in a while, but didn’t there used to be bumper stickers that said something like, “I found The Way?” or maybe “Jesus Is The Way”? Well, about a week ago, in the dark, I was seriously looking for The Way, but not to Jesus — to home.

 My husband helped me, reinforcing my appreciation of marriage as an institution. If home is sometimes described as the place “where they have to take you in” then I think it’s safe to say that a spouse is a person “who has to help you when you’re in a fix.”

Here’s what happened. For the very first time since the COVID closures last March, I resumed doing something I used to do each Thursday evening during the school year, going back several years now: bringing the girl I mentor to her hip-hop dance class, and then bringing her home again. Here she is, after a dance performance back when those actually happened, live.

Last week, though, we both had masks on and the windows were open. This being the first time I’d actually seen her in a few weeks, I learned a lot about how school had been going: both highs and lows, remote and in-person. Thanks to the fact that she’s now enrolled in the “Emergency Services” track of the Concord Regional Technical Center (requiring her to be on-site each day) and is taught by some truly essential workers in the community, she also perked right up along the ride when we encountered a fire truck: “I might know those guys!”

But I digress. My real story is about what happened after I safely dropped her off back at her house. Silly me! I thought that I’d be getting back to my own house shortly — within about 12 minutes — afterwards. It might be worth mentioning here that, since S’s family moved a couple of years ago, I now have a much easier ride over to where she lives: no crossing over the river, and not a single stoplight. In truth, I still don’t fully understand how this route works, in that I had always thought that the main metropolis of Concord lay in a certain definite direction from where I live, and this route has me somehow magically coming from what seems like almost the opposite direction. I think that the shape of certain body of water, a reservoir, has something to do with it, but I’ve never found out for certain. Now I suppose I’m digressing from the digression. But as you will see as the tale continues, the connection is that my directional sense won’t ever win me any prizes.

Anyway, I was especially looking forward to pulling in my driveway on this particular evening, because I had a scheduled ZOOM with a group of geographically distant college friends. Two live in Colorado, one in Seattle, and another in Costa Rica.  This was to be maybe the fourth time we’d done this since the spring; as many of us know by now, these events provide, if not a silver lining, then at least a definite ray of sunshine during the mostly isolated slog we’ve all been doing through the past six months. Here’s a picture of four of the five of us, taken a few years ago.

But a swift trip home to be with them for a full hour on the computer screen was not in the forecast on this particular evening.

Instead, just as I was about to finish the longest part of the ride, heading down a hill that would end at a STOP sign promising that I was only five minutes from home, I was waved down by someone in front of me who said, “You have to stop! There’s just been an accident up ahead and someone is lying in the road!” Apparently, he had been the very first witness of the aftermath of a bike accident, and he knew that the first thing (maybe second, after calling the police) he must do was stop any other cars from driving through there. I then pulled over and became the person stopping cars, while he went back to be with the victim, awaiting more help. It was plenty dark. Fortunately, just a few cars came, and I vigorously waved each one down. The drivers waited, or they turned around.

Finally, a police car did arrive, and eventually someone told us that it would be a while before we could pass this way, so I knew it was time for me to figure out how to get home. Ah! Easier said than done, in this case. No alternate route immediately came to mind. Should I go all the way back to where S’s family lived, head south into Concord (because I knew that way) then west towards home? That would take me about a half hour. Should I pull out my phone and let the Maps help me? No, because I just never liked doing this, seeing all the lines going every which way. Should I start back on the road I thought would be the right one and then also call my husband? YES, because he’d be wondering where I was, anyway.

Starting on my way, hungry and tired and beginning to be stressed, I must have looked similar to (well, a tad older, with no make-up) the woman in this picture.

Sure enough, Rob was very reassuring, in between taking mouthfuls of his dinner.  “No big deal…Just drive down such-and-such road and then you’ll see such-and-such.” He stayed on the line with me, even. I felt better immediately. He knew the roads well, too, since he’d done so much cycling in this area for the past six years. This isn’t him, but close enough.

“Ok, so now watch for a big barn on the left – that’s where you turn.”  Barn? I didn’t see any barn, and was going slowly enough to see it, I thought, so just kept going and going – in the dark.

On both sides of the road, I saw trees, an occasional house.

Finally I came to one of those small, vertical green signs on the right: “Welcome to Webster.” Sure enough, proof that I’d gone too far. So, Rob still with me, I turned around and crept along until I made out what looked enough like a barn, in a faded color, on the right, this time. “OK, now once you get on this road, you’ll recognize where you are.” And I did too, from one of the few bicycle rides that we had done together. But I still had another twenty minutes in the dark car; I arrived late enough to the ZOOM that I needed to ask my friends if they could kindly email me all the news I’d missed.

Mid-afternoon yesterday, I went back to see that barn. What a difference a clear blue sky makes! And fortunately, when marriage is working on all its cylinders, a certain kind of clarity as well as confidence can be happily restored.