It's no use telling me to get lost. I already am. It's a wonder I made it out of the birth canal, and things have been going south (I think) ever since. Not so good with cardinal directions, I'm hopeless with ordinals. If it weren't for Cary Grant, I'd hate "North by Northwest." I can't backtrack any more than I can solve linear equations, no coinkydink considering spatial and mathematical abilities consort hellishly in the brain's frontal lobe, whereas my verbal abilities hang out in the backal making up puns.

A family legend was created the time I couldn't find Omaha. Understandably, the scariest words I can hear are "You can't miss it," or "I'll drive, you navigate," prompted by the other person having seen me drive. Suffice it to say the only states I haven't been flipped off in are Hawaii and Utah -- I've never been there. My creative driving and navigating are linked, because when I realize I am going the coming way, I make "an improper lane change" like the nice ossifer once warned me about, or a U-turn so abrupt it renders passengers speechless and wild-eyed, pointing like

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the townsfolk in "Them" when the ants mutate into gigantic man-eating monsters due to atomic testing. MapQuest helps, though it sometimes sends you into neighborhoods where people would rather shoot you than tell you which way to the museum. And unless you tell it to "avoid this maneuver" (I call it "avoid this manure"), it jerks you around on funny little streets just to save two minutes.

I even get lost in doctors' offices, and if a plant requires a southern exposure, I have to call my daughter. When a road is closed, I puzzle until my puzzler is sore determining an alternate route. And going somewhere once, or even a dozen times, is no guarantee I'll find it again. In fact, if I feel instinctively that I'm going the right way, I'd best turn around.

The place in my head where spatial relationships are mapped is notated "out where the really good steak house used to be," "across from that church where I thought Terri's wedding was until the bride came down the aisle," or "near the fairgrounds, catty-corner from the fiberglass cow."

Finding my way out of a parking ramp is the seventh circle of hell. First I have to find my car. Uh-oh. Then round and round and round I go, and how I get out, God only knows. I always head for the exit lane that has a real person in the cute little glass house where they take your money, because I need somebody to point me back to the hotel.

Well-meaning people give pointers like "In the morning when shadows point west, the sun is east." They might as well be speaking Urdu. The only tip that makes sense to me is that lichen grows on the north side of trees; too bad stopping to inspect bark isn't practical on the freeway. The one place I don't get lost is New York, New York; by jiminy, the Bronx really is up and the Battery down.

You're probably wondering why I don't buy a GPS system. Then I'd have to be downloading new maps all the time, and that is yet another uh-oh.

Naturally my discombobulation gets on everybody's last nerve. I relate all too well to the doomed old lady in the Flannery O'Connor story who exasperates her family by insisting on finding a plantation she remembers from childhood. After much meandering, she realizes it's in Tennessee, and they're in Georgia. At the end, a character called The Misfit shoots her dead and laconically observes, "She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

Christian, a former Dubuquer, is a Des Moines writer whose e-mail address is rebecca.christian@mchsi.com. She and Katherine Fischer authored, "That's Our Story and We're Sticking to It!" which is published by the TH and available through THonline.com.