Every time I walk from my parents’ downstairs to my parents’ upstairs I turn the corner of the stairwell and pretend I can’t see on the walls surrounding me the fruits of my father’s thirty-five years of labor. The map of Grenada he made just weeks before the onset of Operation Urgent Fury. The one of our neighborhood, where he shaded in orange all the best hiding spots for MANHUNT! games. A map of St. Petersburg and a really boring map of Virginia. All of these hung salon-style in a corner of their pre-fab that gets very little light. Contour maps, political maps. Maps I’ve never been able to make sense of.
And this, the map of his thin-worn patience on the morning of my twenty-third birthday:
I’ve always had an excellent sense of direction.
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