Driving By Numbers

Reader Contribution by Cindy Murphy
Published on May 18, 2011
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I live in a Mitten … The Mitten, to be exact.  That’s it … hold up your left hand, fingers together, thumb out at a 45 degree angle.  There you have it – a map of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.  Is that Detroit?  Or an age spot?  You’d think with this handy, built-in map I have wherever I go, I’d never get lost.  Oh, if only these veins, wrinkles, and scars were roads! 

I’ve always been bad with directions.  A recent case in point involves the final leg of the quest to find my young daughter a pair of used cross-country ski boots before Christmas this year.  It proved to be more difficult than I imagined; a good set of used boots are scarce.  I’d scoured used sporting goods stores, thrift shops, and Ebay, and was out of options until someone told me about a man he knew with children who skied.  I called, and sure enough, he had outgrown ski equipment to sell. 

My elation turned to dread when he gave me driving directions.  “It’s easy,” he assured me after I groaned into the phone.  He didn’t understand.  His directions were all “number roads.”  M-43, 52nd Street, and CR-673 – the sum of this equation only added up to one thing:  I was sure to get lost.  I have a deep-seeded inability to grasp anything to do with numbers, probably stemming from that incident in 3rd grade when I was caught cheating on a multiplication test.  Beth Winters didn’t know her times tables any better than I did – which is why I got caught; we had all the same wrong answers.  I should have copied Robby Fisher’s paper; he got an “A,” and I would have avoided a lifelong number phobia.   

Assigning a number to a road takes no imagination; 52nd St. is not nearly as poetically verdant as Forest Lane, as stately as Oak Avenue, or breezy as Lakeshore Drive.  It seems some number road namers have a sense of humor, though.  Take our 71st ½ Street, for example.  What exactly, is a half street?  Will it lead me only half-way there?  Or is it a street that goes the distance and a half?  Either way, I’m sure it’s a long way to travel just to end up in the middle of nowhere. 

The ski boot man’s final instructions were “turn east on South Street.”  Is that even possible?  Could it be anymore confusing?  People in Michigan seem to have never learned our right from our left.   “Turn right” or “turn left” is just not in our vocabulary.  We do, however, know our north from our south, east from our west and everything in between like the back of our hand.  It must have something to do with that built-in map.

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