Fooling around with the mind’s eye
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
I don’t know about you, but the farther away I get from my own neighborhood, the less I know where I am.
I carry around a little map in my head, and on that map, I can pick out where our neighbors are, as long as I am focusing on our block. But when I leave our block, in my mind’s eye, I sometimes put people and things where they actually are not.
For example, I sometimes will say, “I’m going up to Fresno.” Well, you never go up to Fresno from here. You go down to Fresno. But not in
my mind’s eye, which sometimes sees Fresno as “over there someplace,” and not where it is actually is. Perhaps when they hear I am coming, they move the city just to play with my head.
I get lost right here in town because of the way our founders (bless their hearts) laid out some of the streets. In the central city, streets are tilted at 45 degrees from due north, but in my mind’s eye, they are laid out north-south and east-west. I’m always getting turned around.
If I get lost in the town where I live, work and spend most of my time, imagine what happens when I travel.
Mrs. Doud and I went to Denmark once, and in my mind’s eye I could have sworn we were right across the English Channel, south of England.
Well, while I wasn’t looking, they moved Denmark, and there we were, way east of England across the North Sea, and it turned out that Copenhagen, where we were staying, was just a rowboat trip west of Sweden, which I thought was way to the north. Uff dah, as they say over there.
I hate the idea of whole countries, even local neighborhoods, moving around merely to confuse me.
I’m thinking of just staying home.
