Aug 24, 2017 4 min read

We were a couple of knuckleheads on the loose in the city.

I stepped off the train in Washington, D.C., just as the moon was passing between us and the sun. The skies didn’t darken, but all along the route to the hotel, crowds of people had stepped out of offices to look skyward, their eclipse glasses turning them all into grinning insects.

Laura was waiting when the cab pulled in at the hotel. We borrowed some glasses and stepped onto the sidewalk to have a look.

“I’m not seeing anything,” I said, over and over.

“Look up,” she said. “See it?”

“It’s all dark,” I said. And then, “Oh wait. My eyes are shut.”

In my determination not to blind myself, I had smashed the glasses hard against my face, sealing my eyelids closed.

And so began what would be three days of sometimes clueless fun with Laura, she of the big blue eyes, the big voice and the big personality. We became friends as mothers of young children in Greenwich, Conn. Twice a year, we meet somewhere to catch up and see the sights. Between us there are four children, three college degrees, two careers and a thousand funny stories. Over dinner we revisit the stories, embellishing enough to wring out some new belly laughs.

Each trip adds to the list, which brings me to the D.C. Metro.

The city is known for its clean, efficient subway system. As a graduate student there in the early ’80s, I rode the Metro to class and work every day, easily navigating the ticket machines, the turnstiles and the spaghetti of routes.

On Monday, Laura and I entered at DuPont Circle and stood at the ticket machines, trying to figure out how to buy a ticket for the ride to the Smithsonian stop. We read and re-read the instructions, using our pointer fingers to follow along. Trains came and went as we fumbled through.

Now, what? The hotel desk clerk had helped Laura plan the route, a series of rides and transfers that would take us across town. We boarded the red train, took a seat. Talked. Chatted. Laughed. Shared photos. When we finally came up for air, we looked at the lighted message sign indicating the next stop. Laura looked down at her Metro map.

“Do you have reading glasses?” she said. “I can’t read this.”

Neither could I. I would need arms three feet longer to get that map far enough from my eyes to read it. We went to the large map on the train wall. For long minutes we pondered it like a crossword puzzle before coming to our conclusion.

“We’re going the wrong way,” Laura said.

We scrambled off, climbed the stairs over the track and went down to the other side, got on the red train going the other way. Sat down, talked, laughed at our poor sense of direction, got off, got onto the blue train for the next leg of the trip.

Sat down, talked, laughed, talked some more, and then looked up at the sign.

“We’re going the wrong direction,” she said. By now we might have been somewhere underneath Kansas. A kind woman sitting across from us heard and told us how to get to where we wanted to go.

We finally made it to the right stop, but not before crisscrossing beneath our nation’s capital in all four directions. What should have taken two trains and 10 minutes took four trains and a half hour of second-guessing. Passengers are probably still talking about the two knuckleheads lost in the city.

“It’s because of our eyesight,” I said.

“They make the print too small,” said my boon companion.

And besides, the planets were lined up in a strange way. (That probably had nothing to do with it, but that’s my story.)

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.