Thinking my way to Pasadena

When I was little, I had a little girl/big girl crush on Verna Faye Amerine my older next door neighbor. She was a cheerleader who, honest to god, married the quarter back on the highschool football team. He joined the Navy and away they went to San Diego, only to come back to Louisville with tales of Southern California. It could be Verna Faye is responsible for me coming here when I ran away from home as a teenager. I know she wowed me talking about driving on the freeways. The four leaf clover interchange was as mythical and magical to me as the Empire State Building or some such. Apparently she whipped with ease though the all the lane changes and I wanted to do that as well. And I did when I first came here, but I don't drive the freeways anymore because either they are parking lots or full of people with no driver's license or insurance but clearly have a death wish and want to take me with them. Most of the time I do fine on the surface streets, but when I get sidetracked, bad things happen. My advice is not to put your behind behind the wheel of your car while you are thinking hard. I did that yesterday headed for Burbank and the next thing I knew, I was at the intersection of Figueroa and Colorado. Soon thereafter I was rolling past beautiful Pasadena homes, that fell away to some dangerous streets and the person trying to direct me out of there said roll your window up and drive fast... I did. It didn't help since it took me a full two hours of circle driving before my car turned itself into Starbucks where I could sit and calm down. Rarely do I get flummoxed. Yesterday, I was. After driving in SoCal all of my adult life, I ought not to get lost. Verna Faye is probably chuckling to herself somewhere.--Ruth Adkins Robinson