I accept an invitation to lecture at Penn State Lehigh Valley. I’ve never been there so I ‘Mapquest’ it. Two locations pop up but I can’t imagine there are two Penn State Lehigh Valley campuses so I figure one address is across the street from the other and where I need to be will be obvious when I get there.
Still, I mean to make sure.
Forget to.
I leave home at 8 a.m. and see the Penn State Lehigh Valley sign at 10:30 – a half-hour before I am supposed to have lunch with my hosts and some students from the campus newspaper. But the parking lot is eerily devoid of humans and automobiles.
I call my host’s office, having neglected to obtain her cell phone number. Voice mail. I state where I am and what I see. I say I have a feeling I am in the wrong place. I fervently hope she will get this message and call me back.
Then I do what people used to do in the days before Mapquest and GPS and cell phones: I pull into a gas station to ask for directions. The woman behind the counter doesn’t know where Penn State Lehigh Valley is. I take a map from a map carousel and find a list of local colleges and universities. Inexplicably, PSLV is not on the list.
So I ask the counter boys at the doughnut shop next door. One confidently tells me I am very close to my destination. Just go back the way I came and turn right. There’s a sign. I almost thank him and leave, but I hadn’t seen a sign, so I ask him if he knows the name of the street where I need to turn.
He doesn’t. I offer him the map. He studies it. For a very long time.
I have the leisure to observe that he is wearing a wristband decorated with swastikas, which would creep me out except that he is a south Asian guy and I know that the swastika was an ancient symbol from the Indian subcontinent that pre-dated the Nazis by about 5,000 years. (Later, when I look up the history I learn that the rough meaning of the Sanskrit word swastika is ‘that which is associated with well-being.’)
I begin to get anxious about my lunch date. Finally, doughnut boy finds what he is looking for. I ask him to show me. He moves the map from his side of the counter to my side. In so doing, he loses his place on the map and has to find it again. It takes just as long as the first time.
The location he indicates with his thumbnail appears to be nowhere near where we are. I point this out. He is unperturbed, but then, he is the one wearing the symbol associated with well-being. He is not the one who is now officially late for lunch.
The location he indicated turns out to be in downtown Allentown. It also turns out to be Penn Street, not Penn State. A couple of blocks from Penn Street is the post office. Surely someone in the mail delivery business will know were PSLV is.
I have to stand in line. My lecture is scheduled to start in a half hour. The people in front of me are mailing contraband to lost continents. They are insuring their packages and paying in pennies. Or so it seems to me.
My turn. The friendly USPS employee behind the counter does not know the location of PSLV. But she offers to ask someone ‘in the back.’
The main post office in Allentown is a mighty edifice. (It also, I learn later, has a tile floor inlaid with pre-Nazi swastikas.) ‘The back’ is very far away. The friendly USPS person is a very slow walker. My fingernails grow. The snows of Kilimanjaro recede. She returns.
No one in the back knows. But someone in the back knows someone who knows. It requires a phone call. Fifteen minutes until my lecture. She comes back with directions. I promptly get lost. Finally, I hear from my host, who gives me to someone else, who guides me in, though not without another wrong turn. Oh, and by the way, PSLV moved to a new campus last August.
Amazingly, I am early – by two minutes.
After an introduction that makes me sound far too smart to have wandered cluelessly around the Lehigh Valley for 90 minutes, I stride to the podium and plug my flash drive into their computer.
Nada.
I go to Plan B: my computer. A cable has to be fetched to connect my machine to their projector.
The audience shifts in their seats.
I try to entertain them with the story of my morning, wristband swastikas and all.
Then I try to entertain them by spraying steam out of my ears.
And then, at last, I deliver my prepared remarks. If you overlook the two video clips I can’t get to play, it goes fairly well.
The rest of the day’s agenda looks like this: Tour the Martin Guitar factory in nearby Nazareth. Visit friends in the Philly ‘burbs. Pick up my sweetheart at the Philly airport at 1 a.m. Collapse in a Center City Philadelphia hotel room.
The rest of the day goes like this: After my morning of racing around, my gas tank is perilously close to empty. There is no filling station between PSLV and the freeway. Nor at the next exit. Aware that running out of gas is likely to push me over the edge, I get off at the exit after that, pull up to a hotel entrance and ask the guy behind the desk for the closest fuel stop. Out of my way, of course.
By the time I get to the Martin Guitar factory I have missed the last tour of the day, of course. I do get to visit Martin’s museum and play a few guitars that sound like heavy cream compared to my own guitar’s skim milk.
The visit to friends goes off without a hitch, but the 1 a.m. plane is an hour late. And then my love is in my arms and just like that, with apologies to Judith Viorst, the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day is over.
Here is what I learned from it:
If this was a test of my ability to distinguish full-blown cataclysmic disaster from mere annoyance, I passed. I sweated, fumed and almost punched the wall at the Allentown post office, but I never lost my temper. If this was a test of my ability to think on my feet, I failed. Why didn’t I call a friend who could go online and find directions? Why didn’t I call information and get someone at PSLV? In the age of Mapquest and GPS, the ability to read maps and give directions has atrophied. It’s time to get a GPS. I hate getting lost. All’s well that ends well.
