Which Way?

 

Late last Friday night, I finished my stint as a volunteer for a local fundraiser and said goodbye to the other volunteers in the room.  I was in the high school, which is a warren of corridors and rooms lined with identical doors.  It’s like a maze. When I stepped out of the room, I realized I had no idea which direction to take to reach the door that would take me to my truck.  I looked in both directions and could not summon an idea of which way brought me to this room four hours before.

I thought about going back inside and asking for directions, but when I pictured the laughter I would endure, I thought again.  “I am 68 years old,” I told myself.  “Surely I can figure this out by myself.”  How lost could I get in a small-town high school?  The answer, if my history is any indication, is pretty lost.  Thank goodness the school I went to decades ago only had one hallway.

I can’t count the number of times I have come out of a hotel room and turned the wrong way, ending up in front of a blank wall or in another wing of rooms.  My friends who travel with me can describe it better than I can, because they usually just watch me do it and laugh about it later.  I have absolutely no sense of direction or any understanding of left and right.  I can cause a GPS to go silent by turning the opposite of its directions. 

I once spent the better part of an hour wandering about the conservatory at the Opryland Hotel carrying my suitcase, trying to figure out how to get out to the parking lot.  If you haven’t been to the Opryland Hotel, believe me when I say that’s not as crazy as it sounds.  There are towns that could fit in that monstrosity and I’m pretty sure it covers two different zip codes.  I’m pretty sure there are people in there who never figured out how to get out and have to live there now, just wandering up and down the hallways.  It was one of my more traumatic hours; I finally promised God that if he would get me out of there, I would never go back.  I kept that promise for years and only agreed to go in one night to have dinner as long as we didn’t get out of sight of the door. 

It used to drive my mother crazy.  She was one of those people who could be placed in a dark room and distinguish  north from south, east from west.  I can only do that if I am at my house, or if the sun is coming up or going down.  And left and right are a total mystery.  I can hear her now.  “Mary Beth, you just know which is left and which is right!  It just feels different.”  No, it doesn’t.  Unless I am writing something, it doesn’t feel different.  I only know that if I hold up my hands and extend my thumb at a right angle from my index finger, the left hand makes an “L”.  There is no such trick for east and west, north and south.   Mom eventually got used to it, after a few times of watching me leave a parking lot and turn in the wrong direction.  “Where are you going?” she would ask.   I remember one night she, my dad and me were leaving  Nashville and I was going to drive home.  I got to a stop sign and stopped.  “Which way do I go?” I asked.  My dad promptly said, with misplaced confidence, “South.”  My mom practically shouted from the back seat, “She doesn’t know which way that is!”

  "Which way now?"

I had sort of the same reaction when I let a horse trainer friend take my horse, Bullet, for a month of fine tuning in his training.  Bullet and I were in his arena having a lesson and Bruce kept saying, “Lift your left rein, lift your left rein, lift your left rein!  Why aren’t you doing it?” he finally shouted.  “Because I don’t know where that is,” I wailed.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of left and rights in the horse show world.  Of course, you get on the horse on his left side, but that one is pretty easy because the mane is supposed to fall on the right side, so you mount on the side where the mane isn’t.  But when you participate in things like trail class, obstacle driving and reining, the pattern you have to ride has instructions that involve left and right.  I used to mark an “L” and an “R” on my hand so I could glance down and know which way to go.  Reining was especially challenging because the pattern called for things like, two circles to right, stop and perform 3 spins to the left, followed by two circles to the left and 3 spins to the right.  Gallop down the side of the arena and do a right rollback, and so on.  Once memorable time, Bullet and I ended up on the opposite side of the arena from where we were supposed to be.  All the time, I was happily galloping around, thinking we were doing pretty well.  I was mystified why we ended where we did.  Neither me, my confused friends who were watching, or the judge could figure out how I got there.  Bullet may have known, but he wasn’t saying.

I recently had a drive a friend home from a doctor’s visit in Nashville.  I’ve known her for years, but she had never witnessed my handicap.  “You’re going to turn right up there at that light,” she said.  I held up my hands to see which way that was and promptly moved over into the left lane.  She gave me a strange look and I suddenly realized my hand trick had failed me.  Luckily she had a sense of humor and she knew a way to wind around and come out where we needed to be.  The following day, she had to give me directions to her office and she laughed and asked me if I could tell the difference in front and back.  I didn’t blame her.

I got curious and googled “can’t tell left from right.”  Apparently, this condition has a name.  Dyspraxic.  They aren’t sure what causes it.  Someone told me once that it can be caused when parents try to change small children from left to right-handed.  They need to study it more and come up with a cure. I will volunteer for the study.

Last Friday night, I did find my way out of the high school.  I flipped a mental coin and chose a direction and it turned out to be the correct choice.  Once I got a little way down the first hallway, I recognized a picture I had seen and knew I was on the right track.  Or the left track – I’m not sure which!  Maybe I need to start leaving a trail of bread crumbs.