This started out to be a post about how I scored an art set at a friend’s garage sale today but I think getting lost and found was the greater victory.  Galpal Shannon Gronich was part of a community garage sale and I wanted to see her.  I’d been there before, I knew it was in a popular subdivision, I figured my muscle memory would take me there. Wrong.  First, the phone kept ringing and texting in, taking my map off the screen. Second, being a community garage sale, every few blocks had lines of cars stopped or stopping all over the  street.  Then I kept driving straight when I should have made my first left.   Five minutes later I pulled over and text her for the address.  I enter it into my cell phone’s GPS and voila, on the screen appears where I am, where I want to go and how to get there.  Back on the road, I keep glancing at the map but suddenly I am blocks away from where I thought I was, and going in the wrong direction.  WTF?  

I pull over again.  I see the map in real time is going in the opposite direction I am, and the “real time” has a few second delay.  Ok, confusing but I’ll get used to it.  I get back on the road, still inside the subdivision. Twelve more minutes into reading the map incorrectly, I find myself back out on Eber Road.  I text Shannon that I’m lost, I’m confused, I’m leaving, bye.  She calls, sweet angel, and guides me in.

I later thought how interesting I got so frustrated in the span of twenty minutes over something that trivial and easily fixable.  I was ready to cross it off my list and go on to my next stop, driving into Melbourne to deliver the February Horizons Magazine.  Making today a work day, I’d already forgotten my intent was to visit with my good friend and not just make a business call.  I can be so quick to let purely social encounters fall off my schedule. I was glad I stuck it out since Shannon and I had a great visit and made plans to get together soon.  For real 🙂

Shannon should never have garage sales.  She sells everything for like a dollar.  Lucky she had Maggie and Nick there to rein her in.  She had a green filing cabinet in much better condition than mine, but the drawers were letter size and I needed legal size.  She had a small rolling desk that I immediately wanted but the find of the day was a kid’s art set.  It contained markers and colored pencils, crayons and watercolors but also an untouched set of oil pastels! Oil pastels are like oil paints that go on waxy like a crayon, and they look like little chalks. The cheap ones like this are good to block when doing watercolor.  I have a good set of oil pastels and French pastels (softer, chalkier) but wanted a set to take out into the field now that I’m carrying my art bag in the car again.  I bought the set for, you guessed it, $1.

On the way home, I thought how like the oil pastels my GPS map is: you have to look at it in reverse.  With the oil pastels, you lay down the lighter color first, as opposed to the darker colors in painting.

Then came the job of fitting the rolling table in the car full of magazines.  It was easy once I unloaded all the mags and put the table in first.  I love my Toyota Prius! It’s always the perfect size.  A friend called and I decided to scrap going into town.  We had lunch then I came home to break in my new field pastels.  An hour later, I was glad to remember that dish soap is needed to remove the oil pastel from my fingers.

As I sketched and blended, I thought about the feeling today of being lost and confused, and the relief of being found and recognized and welcomed.  How the most menial of things can seem overwhelming if I’m unsure of where I am relative to where I want to be.  How I can feel so grateful for the simplest of things, like knowing rescue is in sight, and that I’ve got a friendly voice on the other end of the phone guiding me in when I can’t find my own way.  May it ever be so.