Off the Mark by Mark Parisi for March 06, 2021

I always like the directions people gave you that included things like, “Turn left the street before the ice cream store…”

Now waitsaminute. Where was I headed for in the first place?

I never found those types of directions useful.

Great idea. A series of audio walking tours of old places. “You’re at the corner. A nice place for lunch now, but 100 years ago the site of a horrible murder.”

Years ago, I used to sell furniture for a major department store. There was a rural area to the south where the residents were resistant to the idea of using their grid addresses. One time I got delivery instructions: “Go down [Smith] road and turn right when you see the horse in the corner of the pasture.”

Me: “What if the horse isn’t standing there?”

“Oh, don’t worry, he’s always there.”

I gave the instructions to the driver. The horse was there.

Plus it can do different voices. It can sound like your mother-in-law, your ex-, or your grandfather. Or just a local gas station attendant.

I like a real roadmap …..GPS’s are not accurate most times.

GPS via my daughter…

A Rhode Island GPS

I still remember being told to turn where the ice cream stand burned down, and I had just moved to the state this guy and I were in.

That’s one way to know you’re getting old- you think in terms of where something USED to be.

We had friends that loved in Princeton, New Jersey. I would give directions to their house that included, “Turn left just past the guy sitting on a bench reading a newspaper.”

There is a bronze statue of a guy on a bench reading a newspaper.

This would be the perfect GPS for me, I am not good at directions but if you say, go a mile and turn left and the old mill, I would know where that is……my kinda GPS! LOL!

Doing a furniture removal once, asked the client for directions…. main street, turn left at the dance school, eventually got there and said I didn’t see the dance school, she replied “oh it’s not there anymore”.

Sound like southern directions. Head down a piece til you pass old Miller farm, turn right where the oak tree done got hit by lightening back in 65, go a piece further to where Johnsons corn fields back into Smiths soybean fields…

GPS: Geezer Positioning System

I love it! It’s the way I give directions. Where I currently live, 90% of the streets are numbers. Like 952 W 7462 E. I do NOT understand them even after being here for 15 yrs. I make people tell me if the address I’m looking for is near the Target or hospital or Walmart or something. When the development I live in was built, there were 3 builders. Some named their streets, some let the city do it. The street I live on was named by the builder and that was what was on the sign, even though it had nothing to do with our address. (We got mail with both addresses) I had to explain to people who came to visit about it. Just follow my directions and ignore the street signs. Last year, the city put up a new street sign with some numbers on it but so far we cannot find any house near the sign with those numbers.

When we went back to my old hometown of Oceanside CA a few years ago, I gave my husband directions like the guy in the strip. Like..go past where the skating rink used to be. He was not amused.

You can’t get there from here, Dave.

I worked in San Francisco for years before I realized one of the local sports was misdirecting tourists.

A fella I know who was a police officer in a rural area for ages always gave directions using cemeteries cuz he could pretty much count on them being there.

I do better with landmark directions. We didn’t have any signs anyway where I grew up. My dad telling me how to get to a town about 30 miles from us. “Go down the road that way till you come to a pretty good road and turn right. Take it between those two buttes and then take the next pretty good road to the left and keep going till you get there.”

In the early 60s our family took a vacation to South Dakota. Dad, being an electrical power engineer wanted to see the new Oahe Dam & hydroelectric station. When he stopped to get gas he asked for directions. The fellow told him, “Take such and such highway north. It’s really big. You can’t help but miss it.” Ever since then, whenever giving directions, I still use that phrase because, “You can’t help but miss it.”

If you’ve ever seen “The Muppet Movie” Fozzie Bear & Kermit The Frog are driving , Kermit says to Fozzie , " Bear left ." & Fozzie says to Kermit “Right , frog!”

There’s a street in Mesquite, Nevada (near Vegas) called “No-Name Road.”

MIL intructions.

Lucky he’s not in Hawai`i. All the streets begin with K.

And when you get to where the Tastee-Freez used to be, turn around, you’ve gone too far.

“Take a left where the old oak tree used to be”

I grew up in a small town and directions were given by who ‘used to’ live someplace — the ‘Huntzeker’ house was actually where the Kellers lived (the Huntzekers actually lived three blocks away). When I was 12, things changed, sort of. Street signs were put up and every house was given a house number to put up. That was the year our town was hooked into the state telephone system and we had to have a telephone book. Before that, we had a telephone operator and we just picked up the phone, the operator would ask ‘name and number please’ and we would tell who we were calling and their 3-digit number. Or maybe just the name (the name was important because there were party lines involved). The street names had always been on the official town map but we had never had to use them before. The house numbers . . . some got put up, some didn’t. When I sold the house 60 years later, the house number was still sitting on the fireplace mantle.