Quarantine: The Commute

It is never a good sign, when you are driving home from a long day at work, to realize that there are four helicopters hovering overhead.  I saw them above and at first tried to pretend that they were really to the left of where my road was going, but soon enough reality invaded this fantasy and I was stuck making the slow choice, along with all other traffic, of turning left or right instead of continuing straight.  I was in a part of Philadelphia that I didn’t know much about other than I didn’t really want to be there, lost, after dark, even in a locked vehicle.  But after choosing to go right, I didn’t have any decisions to make, since we were all moving an inch to the hour down twisting semi-residential streets.

I decided to call my husband, a Philadelphia native, to see if he could help me navigate.  My thinking was that he could look at where I was on his “find my phone” feature and then yell directions at me, like “For the love of god, don’t go down that street!”  Or maybe:  “Turn left!  Left!  No, the other left!”  Etc.  Strangely enough, however, Sean wasn’t so keen on this idea.  He reminded me that our car had a garmin navigator and suggested that I use it.  But forcing me to make a dangerous U-turn only to take me back to the main road still closed off by police and ambulances and mayhem sounded like just the thing our garmin would do.  (We often fight, garmin and I.)

 

Sean then told me to choose the address of his workplace in the garmin and then once I had headed in that direction for many miles, click my ruby slippers and tell garmin I want to go home.  This is what I did, even though this entailed driving white-knuckled in the middle lane of a seven-lane highway, trying to figure out how to get to the left lane to make a left turn while garmin got increasingly disappointed in me.

 

At one point too I heard a ding from the Subaru dashboard, upon which a message came up that said something along the lines of, “It has now been two hours since you put your key in the ignition!”  Thanks for pointing that out, car; time flies when you are having fun.