Re-Run Sunday: Why trusting strangers can always count on me to give 'em wrong directions

It’s a beautiful day for a Sunday drive. Why not get lost? Is that your goal? Then just ask me for directions.

I was going to re-post about “Walking Dead” (AMC season 6 premier tonight, 9 p.m.), but I saw I’d recently re-posted that one already. So here’s one about the lost art of getting lost. 

My favorite line: “We somehow wind up missing so much whenever we always end up going exactly where we think we need to go.”

And be sure to stop by tomorrow when I plan on writing about the intimacies of two people in love sharing one toothbrush.

(707 words)

I think people are always asking me for directions because I walk with a confident stride and have a friendly face. When I’m out for a stroll, I look like the kind of guy who really knows where he’s going.

It’s yet another triumph of appearance over competence because I have no idea where even familiar places are.

But that never stops me from pretending I do. 

Happened again just the other day. A confused elderly woman pulled up beside me as I was out for my morning constitutional. She said, “I am so lost. Can you please tell me how to get to Beechview Avenue?”

“I’ll be happy to!” I said. “Make a left at the second light, turn right at the gas station and just keep going. You’ll run right into Beechview. You can’t miss it!”

You could just see the relief wash over her face. A friendly stranger had cheerfully appeared out of nowhere and vanquished all her concerns. Her thanks were effusive.

Because I’d never heard of a Beechview Avenue, I decided to send her down a long country road. It can be very unsettling being lost in an unfamiliar town. I thought on this beautiful fall day it would be far better for her if she could at least be lost someplace more scenic.

I remember the time a middle aged couple with Ohio plates asked me to help them find the Latrobe post office.

I told them they’d just driven right past it.

“People ask that all the time,” I said, eager to put them at ease. “It’s very poorly marked. Go back the way you came and park outside the store with the Dainty Pastry sign out front. The post office is in there.”

In fact, the post office is about a quarter-mile down the same road in a big grey building with an official-looking “U.S. Post Office” sign out front. But they don’t sell no donuts in there.

Dainty Pastry does and they’re delicious. They have this glazed pretzel-shaped donut I get about once a week or so. And the friendly Dainty Pastry staff will brighten anyone’s day.

The Ohio couple looked to me like people more in need of donuts than stamps.

Who doesn’t?

I think my eagerness to direct people to places they think they don’t want to go stems back to a childhood vacation when the old man was taking us to the Big Apple.

I remember him getting hopelessly lost somewhere near Newark. We could see Manhattan, but had no idea how get there. Desperate for progress, he pulled into a gas station where we were met by a kid who, I swear, grew up to play Paulie Walnuts in “The Sopranos.”

“Can you help us, please?” Dad asked. “We’re trying to get to midtown and I have no idea which bridge we’re supposed to take.”

“Why, sure, I can. Where youse folks from?”

“Pittsburgh,” my Dad said.

In hindsight, I don’t whether that was the right or wrong answer. Maybe the wise guy had a former girlfriend from Pittsburgh who’d treated him cruelly. Or maybe he loved Jack Lambert from the old Steelers and felt Pittsburghers enjoyed overcoming logistical challenges.

Either way, he spun a glorious tapestry of mis-direction that had us speeding north up the Jersey turnpike, crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, heading west through the Lincoln Tunnel and back again.

I may be mistaken, but I recall Dad parking the old Ford Fairmont near the base of the Statue of Liberty so Mom could use the restroom — and Liberty Island is inaccessible to vehicular traffic.

Even through the recollected static of my frustrated father’s profane outbursts, it’s a wonderful memory.

Of course, today no one needs ever get lost again. We just punch the coordinates in the phone and follow the little green arrows.

That’s good, sure, but we’re losing the serendipity of unplanned discovery. 

We somehow wind up missing so much whenever we always end up going exactly where we think we need to go.

I can foresee a day not far off when telling someone to get lost is no longer an insult.

It’ll be travel advice for people interested in enjoying an offbeat vacation.

Related . . .

I pranked the trash man today

A tale of turtles, pranks & Manti Te’o

Prank phone calls now and then

Random thoughts from NYC

Why I always give trusting strangers wrong directions

(707 words)

I think people are always asking me for directions because I walk with a confident stride and have a friendly face. When I’m out for a stroll, I look like the kind of guy who really knows where he’s going.

It’s yet another triumph of appearance over competence because I have no idea where even familiar places are.

But that never stops me from pretending I do. 

Happened again just the other day. A confused elderly woman pulled up beside me as I was out for my morning constitutional. She said, “I am so lost. Can you please tell me how to get to Beechview Avenue?”

“I’ll be happy to!” I said. “Make a left at the second light, turn right at the gas station and just keep going. You’ll run right into Beechview. You can’t miss it!”

You could just see the relief wash over her face. A friendly stranger had cheerfully appeared out of nowhere and vanquished all her concerns. Her thanks were effusive.

Because I’d never heard of a Beechview Avenue, I decided to send her down a long country road. It can be very unsettling being lost in an unfamiliar town. I thought on this beautiful fall day it would be far better for her if she could at least be lost someplace more scenic.

I remember the time a middle aged couple with Ohio plates asked me to help them find the Latrobe post office.

I told them they’d just driven right past it.

“People ask that all the time,” I said, eager to put them at ease. “It’s very poorly marked. Go back the way you came and park outside the store with the Dainty Pastry sign out front. The post office is in there.”

In fact, the post office is about a quarter-mile down the same road in a big grey building with an official-looking “U.S. Post Office” sign out front. But they don’t sell no donuts in there.

Dainty Pastry does and they’re delicious. They have this glazed pretzel-shaped donut I get about once a week or so. And the friendly Dainty Pastry staff will brighten anyone’s day.

The Ohio couple looked to me like people more in need of donuts than stamps.

Who doesn’t?

I think my eagerness to direct people to places they think they don’t want to go stems back to a childhood vacation when the old man was taking us to the Big Apple.

I remember him getting hopelessly lost somewhere near Newark. We could see Manhattan, but had no idea how get there. Desperate for progress, he pulled into a gas station where we were met by a kid who, I swear, grew up to play Paulie Walnuts in “The Sopranos.”

“Can you help us, please?” Dad asked. “We’re trying to get to midtown and I have no idea which bridge we’re supposed to take.”

“Why, sure, I can. Where youse folks from?”

“Pittsburgh,” my Dad said.

In hindsight, I don’t whether that was the right or wrong answer. Maybe the wise guy had a former girlfriend from Pittsburgh who’d treated him cruelly. Or maybe he loved Jack Lambert from the old Steelers and felt Pittsburghers enjoyed overcoming logistical challenges.

Either way, he spun a glorious tapestry of mis-direction that had us speeding north up the Jersey turnpike, crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge, heading west through the Lincoln Tunnel and back again.

I may be mistaken, but I recall Dad parking the old Ford Fairmont near the base of the Statue of Liberty so Mom could use the restroom — and Liberty Island is inaccessible to vehicular traffic.

Even through the recollected static of my frustrated father’s profane outbursts, it’s a wonderful memory.

Of course, today no one needs ever get lost again. We just punch the coordinates in the phone and follow the little green arrows.

That’s good, sure, but we’re losing the serendipity of unplanned discovery. 

We somehow wind up missing so much whenever we always end up going exactly where we think we need to go.

I can foresee a day not far off when telling someone to get lost is no longer an insult.

It’ll be travel advice for people interested in enjoying an offbeat vacation.

Related . . .

I pranked the trash man today

A tale of turtles, pranks & Manti Te’o

Prank phone calls now and then

Random thoughts from NYC

Tiger fires his Tonto

Who’d have figured? Today’s most famous celebrity break-up doesn’t involve shiny Hollywood starlets, but a professional golfer who hasn’t won since 2009 and the guy who toted his golf sticks.

As is required in any TMZ break-up, the two men were passionate lovers.

Not of each other.

Of themselves.

After enriching him for 12 years to the tune of more than $10 million, Tiger Woods decided he needed another caddie and fired Stevie Williams, who is to surly what Hershey is to sweet.

This is big news in the insular golf world where sycophantic golf writers are today asking, Stevie, are you bitter? Stevie, will you write a tell-all? Stevie, will you grant me an exclusive?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is asking, Stevie, just who the hell are you?

I guess the best way to answer that question is he’s what you’d get if you combined Tonto with Paulie Walnuts, the sidewalled thug who used to whack all Tony Soprano’s real and perceived enemies.

Like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, he provided on-course guidance and was intensely loyal to Tiger, who is now renown for being intensely loyal to his own selfishness.

And like Paulie to Tony, he was a numbskulled goon. He’s wrestled cameras from countless photographers whose trigger fingers he deemed too itchy (one belonging to an off-duty policeman), and threw one fan’s $7,000 camera into a pond.

He called Phil Mickelson, one of the game’s truly nice guys, a word the newspapers deemed unworthy of proper publication (out of my respect for my newspaper background, I’ll not repeat the slur. Hint: it starts with a “p” and ends with a “rick”).

He’d glare at anyone who’d so much as dare extend a pen and paper or a warm handshake in Tiger’s direction.

“He ain't there to talk to every Tom, Dick and Harry at the course each day,” Williams said. “He's there to work. And to win. And if anybody doesn't like it, that's their problem."

He was saying Tiger cared only about winning (we soon learned in sensational fashion winning wasn’t all Tiger cared about).

Now after spending more than a dozen years seeing a man treat individuals and loved ones like hapless extras in a Batman movie, his tender feelings are hurt he’s being treated like a hapless extra in a Batman movie.

“I’m extremely disappointed, given all I’ve been through the past 18 months,” he says, referring to Tiger’s myriad scandals, injuries, swing changes and what for him is an interminable losing streak.

“You could say I’ve wasted the last two years of my life.”

If that’s the way he feels, it’s actually worse than that.

This is a man of considerable means, a married father. He lives in New Zealand, a land I know virtually nothing about, but I can’t believe it would be as easy to blow $10 million there than a less remote land like, say, Old Zealand, wherever the hell that is.

Most of us dream of having money so we could spend more time enjoying our families, our friends and our pastimes.

I contend the years he spent with Tiger were the ones he wasted.

Together, the pair won 13 major championships, 72 professional tournaments and nearly $1 billion in earnings.

I wonder why it is I look at both and feel like using a judgmental word my newspaper background makes me uncomfortable using without two on-the record sources.

Hint: It starts with an “l” and ends with an “osers.”