Melissa's Place

We’ll just follow you

My mother and her boyfriend, S., came to visit me in Mississauga today. We met at a shopping centre then the plan was to go to the golf course where Mark and I are going to be married this summer and then to proceed to my place. S had a little hand-held GPS gadget which could give directions on how to get to your appointed destination given your current location. It was quite neat, however, when we were leaving the golf course to go to my apartment, it began to act funny (we were, no doubt, not using it correctly), so S just said, “We’ll just follow you!”

I immediately get tense with this suggestion. I remember, about a million years ago, when I was just a little tyke and my mother and I were driving around in the crazy jungle of Toronto traffic, following my Aunt’s car on a highway to somewhere. This was before the days of the cell phone, or at least before we had begun using them. Anyway, I was very small and I told my mother that I had to pee. She looked at me desperately and said, “Melissa, can you hold it?” I remember telling her it was very, very urgent. However, she couldn’t catch the attention of the rest of our family members in the car in front of us. No matter how we honked or waved at them, they didn’t understand that we had to break out of the procession for a pit stop. My mother wasn’t sure of the directions to our final destination, which obviously couldn’t be that important because it’s slipped my mind. However, the fact that we didn’t know how to get there on our own was VERY important. My mom just shook her head at me, told me to be a brave big girl and that we could not stop. I ended up having to use some disposable container found inside the car and crouching in the leg space in front of the passenger seat in the middle of Toronto’s rush hour traffic. The only saving grace was that it was an 80’s Grand Le Mans and not a 2007 Honda Civic.

This is all going through my mind when S suggests he’ll just follow me. Also the fact that we (my mother and I) become excited and frantic and exasperated very quickly in high stress situations like trying to time lights so both cars can get through them and not losing the person tailing you. So I said, “I’ll give you the address in case we lose each other.” The fact that they did not write it down did not ease my worries.

Well, there must be about thirty stoplights between that golf course and my apartment. And within the first four, they were out of eyesight. I was obviously driving too fast. Or S was driving more slowly. Or the lights were not cooperating. A black SUV hedged his way between us and then we were no longer together. I pulled into a left turning lane at Erin Mills Parkway and squinted into the rearview mirror to try to recognize S’s bronze civic. When I finally did, I tried rolling down the window and waving my arm frantically. A friendly driver a few cars behind me waved back. As the bronze sedan approached the lights, I willed him into the left turning lane. I willed him to see my car and recognize it. Unfortunately, they drove past and all I could do was honk a few times as they passed so they’d at least realize they were passing the turn.

They did.
They turned around and made the correct turn BEFORE I managed to make my left hand turn. So now I had a car “following” me, which was in front of me. And my fear was that they might speed up in order to catch up to the ME they likely believed was in front of them. So I had to speed up in order to catch them.

All in all, we got to where we were going. As I’ve become accustomed to, most of the drama was actually all in my mind. If I can offer a word of caution though, the “we’ll just follow you” method of navigation is a good plan A if, and only if, you have a good plan B.