Lost in love and I don’t know much

We celebrated our 39th wedding anniversary recently. If there is a thread that runs through our relationship, we’ve been getting lost together since 1977, when we met. Our life together has been filled with joy and wonder and heartbreak and devastation. And no matter where we go, we get lost — every time. We are the two dumbest people in the world.

I attended a college yearbook workshop at Athens, Ohio University. I met my fellow workshopper at our college’s journalism building that Sunday morning. He was also to be my driver to the Ohio University workshop.

He wore all white, his long, thick black hair jetting out from a white cap like Bob Denver wore in “Gilligan’s Island.” Dirty white sneakers, white jeans and a white shirt finished the ensemble. I was not impressed. The Brooks Brothers or Bobbie Brooks of the 1970s influenced neither of us. I wore jeans, a wrinkled shirt and a red bandanna over my less-than-tidy hair.

His car was a 1960s model black Caddy the size of Montana. He asked me if I knew how to get to Athens, Ohio.

I mumbled, “Go through Indianapolis.”

I crawled into the comfortable red leather back seat and immediately fell asleep. Through Indianapolis we went, the Caddy rolling on the open road, heading southwest to go southeast. Our little detour through Indy added four hours to the trip. My bad.

I woke up to find our driver standing outside the car, looking across the Hocking River. We had ended up on a dirt-covered access road. Across the river was the campus of Ohio University, our destination.

So close and yet so far away.

Ten minutes later, we arrived at the campus; a yearbook friend I knew yelled out the window, wondering what had taken us so long.

I shouted back, “I never want to see this S.O.B. ever again,” a lovely story about my triple X vocabulary that did not impress my betrothed family when someone told this story at our wedding rehearsal dinner.

Looking for America together

Like the Simon and Garfunkel song, we married our fortunes together and spent the next four decades looking for America:

• On the way to and from our honeymoon in Key West, we managed to get lost in Miami in our 1981 Chevette, landing at the same intersection twice. Or is there a Burger King at every intersection?

• “Do not miss the cutoff for Bedford, or you’ll end up on the Big Dig,” my husband said to me repeatedly as we drove to the Boston area on a late 1990s visit to my aunt and family in our hideous white Ford minivan that was identical to the Bunny Bread mobile. Of course, I missed the exit during Friday afternoon rush hour traffic and headed right into the heart of Big Dig construction. The distraught screaming from my husband and child did bother me.

When our son brought his partner home to meet us for the first time, my husband got lost coming out of the Indianapolis airport, missed the northern cutoff, and part of Interstate 70 was redirected out on the southeast side of town about halfway to Cincinnati. The drive from the airport to the northeast side of Indy took about two hours.

This poor woman, my son’s girlfriend, had only met us on Zoom; our airport meeting was our first real introduction. What an impression we made on the new girlfriend as we screamed at other cars, at each other, circling roundabouts, many roundabouts, on the way.

When we had an empty nest, we started traveling in Europe. We’ve been lost together in fifteen countries, about thirty states, and some of your finer cities: Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, Dublin and Milan. We’ve been lost in our little town. (Never volunteer to take home extra children at a Boy Scout meeting.)

Getting lost does occasionally have its advantages. Looking for a pharmacia on a rainy Venice afternoon, we saw much more of the real Venice than our tour. We crossed the same bridges twice and had an incredible lunch in a place that didn’t seat more than ten.

When we married, we were in our twenties and couldn’t see farther than our next paychecks. There was no GPS for marriage; we worked together and figured it out.