This morning, apropos of nothing, I was thinking of a time 25 years ago when my friend Chuck and I were in my car in Cincinnati. Where had we gone? I have no idea. But on the way home we needed to make a detour, and I handed Chuck my map of the city, torn in half right down the middle. So really, I handed him two maps, one west and one east. Chuck was dumbfounded. But on we drove, crisscrossing back and forth from one map to the other as we wound our way south.
Some months later when I prepared to leave Cincinnati, Chuck gave me the perfect going-away gift: a laminated map of Austin. It rode with me for years, until eventually Google took its place. But I still have it, and it’s still in one piece.
Here's a poem from Naomi Shihab Nye that takes the torn map to metaphorical places. It’s from her book Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, a book for children that still has plenty to say to us adults with all that we know now of time and distance.
“Now all the roads
ended in water.”
