YOU ARE HERE

When I was five years old, my father lost me at the San Francisco Zoo in front of the elephant habitat. I keenly remember the feeling, the opposite of panic, as everything around me slipped in to slow motion. I did not want the strangers around me to notice what had happened, that my dad had screwed up, so I just stood there frozen. Five minutes passed in an hour as I watched one of the elephants eat some very moldy-looking hay, and I felt sorry for both of us. This was to be the basis of my understanding that adults were fallible. I willed myself to keep breathing and not move a muscle until Dad found me. I wondered if Mom would be mad at him should he arrive home from our outing with just my brothers, and I considered that to be a definite possibility. Actually, growing up, my dad lost me at various other places - Andy's Pet Shop, Orchard Supply, Mel Cotton's Army Surplus, but the zoo incident was classic. I asked him once if he remembered that day and, with a sheepish grin, he told me about the serious look on my face when he and my brothers finally backtracked to those poor elephants and found me. Apparently, I did not cry until he picked me up. As an adult, I still get lost a lot and hate the feeling just as much. Whenever I'm at O'Hare airport or Union station, the Chicago Botanic Gardens or Art Institute, Navy Pier or the Museum of Science and Industry, I search for those huge framed maps and seek out the big red X or dismembered hand that points to where I am. Can't read a map worth a damn, but I love those three little words: YOU ARE HERE.<\div>

Yesterday, Charlie and I brought a picnic to Bickford and ate lunch with Dad in the courtyard. Afterward, there was a concert in the dining room and a one-man-band played tunes from decades past. Dad listened quietly and nodded off, but suddenly came-to-life when he heard THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA being played on the saxophone. An old Stan Getz song awakened something in my father's brain and he started to weep softly. He was in a different era, to be sure, and probably the one where he was a young soldier courting a beautiful Swedish girl with pinned-up pigtails, but there it was - the big red X - the pointing finger. He reached for my hand and kissed my palm. He confused me for my mother. That's okay, Dad. YOU ARE HERE.