FEB. 24, 2008 - MOMMY and ME – BLOG #002 – THE DISAPPEARING BIG YELLOW SIGN

Mommy often wanted to get in her car and drive to my house with a “big pot of green beans” or something good to share with me. This was always a tense adventure for me . . . thirty minutes to my house from hers . . . 86 years old and alone . . . driving a car?. I knew that I would have to confiscate the keys very, very soon, but she was just so proud to pull up in my driveway and blow the horn to let me know that she had arrived. She always emerged from the driver’s seat with that big pretty smile on her face . . . the smile seemed to ask for my approval.

One Sunday afternoon, an afternoon that I didn’t actually drive to her house and follow her to my house without her knowing it, she called and told me that she was on her way. An hour passed before I got on the road and traced the preset route that we went over many times. She was to turn left at the BIG YELLOW SIGN (A “Midas Muffler” sign) . . . a sign that one couldn’t miss, the sign that actually was at the corner of the very first traffic light after turning onto “Grand River Avenue” about ¾ of a mile. After getting to her house and finding no signs of her, “THE VOICE” told me that she’s still on her way to my house. While jetting back to the crib, she called me from her little cell phone that I got her months before, the phone that at any time she had no idea how to operate even after spending hours trying to teach her to use, the phone that she’d leave at home almost all of the time. She called my cell phone from the numbers that I had plastered all over the back of her phone. Her little voice said, “hey Guy . . . Guy, I’m lost.” After I regained my composure and everything else, I finally narrowed down where she was. I found her about a quarter of a mile from my house in a party store parking lot, a party store parking lot, in the dark setting in her car, in the dark..

This is what happened. She missed her left turn and kept going till she was almost downtown (about a 45 minute ride). She decided to turn around and come back and observed the name of a street that she was familiar with and turned onto it and pulled into this parking lot to call me. “I didn’t see the yellow sign Guy,” she insisted. I found out why the next day, I found that Midas Muffler had sold their business to “Firestone.” The Firestone sign was red and white . . . the BIG YELLOW SIGN had disappeared