An Inate Sense of Direction.... What?

A long, long time ago, light years from where I am now. Way back before kids, before I was married, a time where my now wife was still in the throes of rapture over me, yeah, talking a long time ago. In those days, when my money was spent on me and time was always available, a group of us decided to chuck the February snow and ice and fly to Jamaica for 2 weeks. After getting used to the immediate surroundings, we decided to leave the villa in our little red Mitsubishi and venture into Montego Bay for some nightlife. We really didn’t know where we were headed but fortunately for us, our friend announced that we were not to worry as he had, “an innate sense of direction”. Three hours later, we were lost in the mountains and ended up stopping for directions at what turned out to be a local house of ill-repute. To say that we stuck out would be understating the whole situation. Some one there did recognize the description of our villa and offered to lead the way back. What we didn’t know was how quickly he was going to lead us there. As we were whipped back and forth over the bench seat of our little car, it bounced over mammoth holes in the road. On more than one occasion, we barely skirted a tumble off the cliffs which were a mere few inches away from the side of the road. The whole time our friend sat seemingly calm, clutching the steering wheel and trying to keep up with the speeding vehicle in front of us. The only trace of any tension in him were his white knuckles and his toneless, constant singing, over and over again, “just another day, just another day, just another day...” I didn’t know or care what the song was, I just wanted to get to our place, grab the neck of a bottle of rum and swish this terrifying ride out of my head. Obviously, we made it back alive and upon grabbing the aforementioned bottle of rum, it was there decided that our friend with the “innate sense of direction” would no longer be allowed anywhere near the front seat of our little red car.

As everyone knows, we in Kingston put up with wet, horrible winter months just for the sheer pleasure of living here during the summer. There is always something to do and usually you can find someone to do it with. Getting friends and family to come down for a visit is as easy as asking them. So it was no surprise to us when some friends from our university days called and asked if they could sail down to Kingston for a weekend visit. Now, there is only one thing better than being in Kingston in the summer and that is being in Kingston in the summer while on a boat. We casually leaped at the offer, arranged a mutual weekend that was good for all and then anticipated their visit. We had expected them to arrive at around 2:30 in the afternoon, we had heard from them via cell phone that they were just off the western tip of Amherst Island. Hours passed and we still hadn’t heard any word of their whereabouts. I wasn’t too concerned for their safety, as I knew they had all the required gear that was needed for a boat of that size. I thought that maybe the battery in the cell phone had died. A thought went through my mind that perhaps they missed the end of Amherst and continued on down the south coast of Wolfe Island, but I shook that one off as being too hard to miss the gap between the two islands. As early evening arrived, my wife and I went home and had supper. We were not surprised to get their phone call and now only mildly surprised to find out that they did indeed miss the gap. I doubt it would surprise you that our driver in Jamaica, the one with the “innate sense of direction” is the same guy who sailed right past Kingston.

Their voices were weary, a little stressed, but excited as they told us they were at the downtown Kingston marina and we made arrangements to meet on a patio for a snack and drinks. There was a slight delay getting together, believe it or not, they got lost walking to the patio where we were waiting (they were at the Kingston Yacht Club and not Confederation Basin).

To say their trip went smoothly after they rerouted themselves from Cape Vincent back to Kingston would be a little misleading. To go through their trip event by event is a little too painful to relate. Suffice to mention, unfolding a seldom used chart of Kingston and finding that mice had made dinner of the approach to Kingston and the harbor, finding a shoal that had no visible markings, and a few unexpected jibes that would rattle most sailors nerves. Like all adventures, we got the whole report in the tiniest of details, from the moment they cast off in Brighton to the moment they sat down beside us. A perfect summer night in Kingston, great company, stories to last all evening, a couple of jugs of cold draught beer and sitting on a warm breezy patio. As the evening wrapped up we had to ask Regina if Michael’s “just another day” mantra had resurfaced during the sail down. She just smiled and said, “No, no. He has become much more colorful in his language since buying the boat”. Ah, a true skipper emerges.

Everybody Loves A Mystery

Everybody loves a mystery. I am not referring to the mysteries of life, and we all know there are many of those. The mystery I am talking about are more in the vein of who-killed-Professor-Plum-in-the-library-with-a-wrench, type of mystery. The sheer popularity of this genre over the years as demonstrated by the number of novels, movies, television shows and newspapers articles that outlined the unknown, the unanswered and the unexplained can attest to that. Kingston has had its own share of mysteries over the years. We can look back to the earliest days of the city or examine the most recent of crimes in the pages of our newspaper to try and understand the unknown. I know I have played amateur detective when looking at some of Kingston’s most famous or infamous mysteries. The popularity of the Ghost Walk of Kingston, which takes people on a walking tour of some of the more famous ghostly stories of our past shows the fascination most people have about things they do not know the answer to.

The reason I brought this up is that I was faced with a mystery of my own just a few months ago and spent many hours analyzing the events to try and get some sort of understanding of what occurred. As I mentioned, everyone loves a mystery and I am no exception.

I awoke one morning after an especially unrested, fitful sleep, even before my alarm sounded at my usual time. I skipped my morning exercise, grabbed a quick breakfast and made my way into work. Like most people, first thing in the morning is not the time of day to be at the top of my game. It usually takes a little while before my consciousness catches up with me. I got into the office, mostly by rote, just following the car ahead of me. Once there, I had turned my computer on and starting going through my morning rituals, which mostly entailed of me shaking my head a few times to clear the cobwebs. I checked my email to see if there were any pressing matters to be attended to. I took a look at the time located on the taskbar of my computer and then glanced at the watch on my wrist, a gleaming new one I bought just a few short weeks before and saw that my computer time was off. That in itself is not surprising, most people have encountered a dying battery in their computer before or a situation where the system has re-booted itself to a different day and sometime year. I simply reset the time to match my watch. I continued on like any other day until someone asked me what time it was. I told them and was quickly corrected by virtually everyone in earshot. It turned out my computer had the right time and my gleaming new watch did not. After years of always having the latest advances in many things, I have settled back into old and familiar and this is true with my watch. No longer did I want or need a watch that could tell me where I was on the earth (and believe me, there were times that I needed that information), what time it was in any of twenty four time zones or even have the ability to change a television station. All I wanted was a watch that would tell me the time of day and maybe what day of the month it was. I had opted for an old style analogue watch by a well known manufacturer. It cost me about a week’s wages, which shows one of two things, either I paid a lot for it or it is a very cheap watch. But given the circumstances that the watch had not stopped before and I didn’t do anything to make it start going again, the only certainty was that I was out twenty minutes. Twenty minutes out of my life that were for all intense and purposes, unexplained. At my age, losing any time out of my life is a matter of note. Using the astute logic and reasoning I am known for, my only conclusion was I had been abducted by aliens. That would explain the bad sleep, the bad dreams I was sure I was having and the strange markings on my body. Of course, when I expounded on my theory, I was met with blank stares (a blank look that seemed frighteningly similar to those eyes I saw in my dreams) and the usual amount of disbelief from non-believers. My wife who throughout most of my life has rallied to my side in times of confusion was for the most part.... disbelieving. I was so absolutely sure of my experience that I had now started to sleep with a half-cocked eye, so I would be fully aware of any nocturnal events. I was searching my body for those tiny pinpricks you always read about in the Enquirer. My television shows of choice no longer surrounded comedy and even “24" took a backseat to the Space Channel as I tried to compare my own meeting of the third kind to that of others. It was all encompassing at times. Was I yet another chapter in the abductions that are splashed across the pages of some of the more noteworthy publications that grace our grocery check out line? Would my experiences come out in the middle of some hypnotic trance that would be so terrifyingly real that my hair would turn white? These are the mysteries that keep me going from day-to-day.

In this particular case, the mystery was resolved in the most scientific of ways. When I was pulling a T-shirt over my head, a string of thread caught on the winding stem of my new watch and pulled it out to the first stage position, stopping the watch. By pushing it in, the watch started again. There was my missing twenty minutes. The whole basis of this abduction experience was now more of a case of tossing and turning in a fitful sleep. The strange markings on my body? On reflection they were most likely from the vinyl lawn chair in my yard. Bad dreams? Could be anything from a pizza too late at night to dredging up the memories of a horrible alien abduction movie like,”Night Skies” which I watched with my kids a while ago. So there went my personal mystery and my hopes for immortality in the legends of alien encounters. Now back to drudgery of everyday life. That is, until the next mystery grabs a hold of me.