Funny mother/son story for today:

I took A.J. to the driver's license testing station to take his permit test (it's a multiple choice test on a computer). He passed. This is good! The testing place has a building, two or three oddly small parking lots, and then a bunch of "streets" which make up the course for the driving part of the test. A.J. was only there for the permit test, not the driving part, so when we were finished in the building, we went back out to the parking lot to get in the VW and drive home...or so we thought...but we had no clue how to get out of there. It was like a maze!

Now you might already know this about me, but I am seriously directionally impaired. Like all of the women in my family, I can get lost in my own house. So there are often very funny things that happen in my daily life because of this, but today's was particularly side-splitting for us because we ended up driving out of the parking lot and right onto the (empty) driving test course. It has all these one-way streets and a lot of signs telling you not to enter. But we could not for the life of us figure out what street to use to get out of the whole testing center area! We drove around on that course for a while, coming to the conclusion that we were lost. It seemed hysterically funny to us both.

Ultimately we were laughing so hard, I had to drive us back to the parking lot, turn off the car, and laugh until I couldn't laugh anymore. Then I waited until some other family was leaving the lot, and I followed them in a circuitous, goofy route out of there and back to civilization as we know it.

The whole thing was too much fun.

A.J. can take his behind-the-wheel lessons now and can begin to practice driving with...me! (I'm truly a good, safe driver, I just have no sense of direction.)

I can navigate big cities like San Francisco because I study the map and I write things down and I do just fine. What's harder for me is my own territory. Ask me how to get to my neighborhood, for example. Ask me which way is North/South/East/West! (California is easier because it has the ocean to your west. Well, usually to your west, occasionally it's to your north, isn't it?) eeeek!

A.J. does seem to have inherited this problem from me. I am urging him to get a map of our suburb and the Twin Cities and put it up on the wall and study it. He could create landmarks, circle his friends' neighborhoods, see where ours is in relation to those, and so on.

I have met a few people who are as directionally impaired as I am. It seems to go hand in hand with a high IQ. Huh!