Where am I? Where are you?

"I've been driving around for hours...and I'm lost." This late on a rainy evening and in a quavery voice. One way streets, construction sites, sudden missed turns, unexpected curbs, left turn or was it right?, ambiguous signs, no clear landmarks in the dark and the narrow canyon-like city streets: all of these in her words, and especially in the weariness of her voice. "Where are you?" is the question we asked over and over, but there was no clear answer. The streets were empty of passersby, the buildings shut up, the street names high overhead and ill-illuminated when peered at from the stop line.

Of course, we were called to help, find her and get her home, but we, indoors, reaching into the phone with our ears to 'see' where she was, and she, speaking to us while looking around for clues, signs, anything that might help, found ourselves in a strange encounter. She, surrounded by very real but unfamiliar buildings seen through street lamp lit rain, simply wanted to know how to get home. We, warm and dry, were trying to imagine what she was seeing--very murky and indistinct cinematic impressions coming to mind--while very intense and distinct to us was the desperation in the voice and the pressing responsibility to do something right away. 

The responsibility was taken up be others. The contact was finally made in a deserted corner of  Boston's financial district: each turning around and there the other was. Luch got home--it was quite some distance--and she and her rescuers slept late the next morning. But our portion of the 'adventure' hangs in my mind as a special space or rather two spaces linked by an on again off again phone: we enquiring of her, she of her surroundings for location; she seeking of us, we in frustrated perplexity about solutions. Round and round.

 Never again, we commanded; never again, she swore: words from the post-crisis. Perhaps we thought these promises would somehow feel like, even be, the solution. But there were no shortcuts or exits out of the encounter-as so often there are not.