Assumptions

We had many adventures during our biannual sojourn to my native land but none were as absurd, nor as exasperating, as those brought about by several basic, and seemingly innocuous, assumptions.

Not being the type of people to leave things to chance, we embarked on our journey with maps, lists of phone numbers, detailed directions and enough paperwork to outfit a modest-sized bureaucracy. There were a few minor gaps in our data but we (here's that word again) assumed we could patch those holes after we arrived.

And so the adventure began.

We landed in Halifax, toured Nova Scotia, visited Prince Edward Island, drove through New Brunswick and Maine and made it to home territory without getting ourselves lost (or even overly bewildered) once. Now, maybe it was misplaced confidence in my ability to retain local knowledge after a six-year absence, but the few days on home ground often found us maddeningly out of our depth.

Take the simple act of going to my son's apartment.

My son and his fiancée had invited my wife and I out for a Father's Day dinner and had made reservations at a local restaurant. We spent the day visiting friends and then, with naive optimism, set out for his apartment.

I knew I could find it because he had given detailed directions: "Go one block past the pharmacy, turn right and our building is on the corner." My assumption, as he didn't bother to give me his apartment number, was that his name would be next to his front doorbell. His assumption, of course, was that I already knew it.

You guessed it up to this point, no doubt. We arrived to find there were no names at all next to any of the doorbells. Somewhere in one of the sixty-eight apartments my son was wondering where I was and in the car park below I was considering shouting out his name (like some perverse re-make of West Side Story) until he poked his head out the window or his neighbors began hurling rotten vegetables. (Incidentally, have you ever wondered about how, in the original West Side Story, Tony manages to wander randomly onto a street in a Puerto Rican neighborhood, shout, "Maria!" and only one woman answers him?)

Anyway, I wasn't too worried because I has his phone number written down so all I needed to do was find a pay phone and call him. This involved the tempting assumption that they hadn't removed all the pay phones over the past six years, which, of course, they have. Our search for a pay phone took us from one convenience store/gas station/lap dance parlor to another and, when we finally found one, it was vandalized. The second one almost worked (I had to keep shoving the cord back into the handset to get a dial tone) but wouldn't connect me to my son and swallowed all of my change. An increasingly frantic search lead me to a working payphone and a need for more change.

Armed with Tic-Tacs, a small bag of peanut M&Ms and the resulting change from a $5 bill I returned to the working phone and called my son. After several frustrating attempts and a lengthy chat with the operator, it came to light that I had written his number down incorrectly.

With no way to contact my son, we returned to his apartment building to see if we could will him to come down by wandering around outside and wishing really hard. When that failed to work we went back to the pay phone where I called my other son and got his voice mail. I was going to tell him to call me back but noticed pay phones no longer have their phone numbers on display for the convenience of pimps, crack dealers and absent minded fathers. So I called my friend's house, where we were staying, and left increasingly gibbering messages on his voice mail (for both his cell and home phones) instead.

Every rational avenue for contacting my son had been exhausted, but before we resorted to shouting in the parking lot for him, I had one last, desperate, idea. Knowing the way my mind malfunctions, I was pretty sure I must have transposed some digits when writing down his number. I picked a likely pair, reversed them, dialed this new number and the gods smiled.

He and his fiancée were beginning to worry but when I told him of our plight he was suitably chagrined at not having told us his apartment number. I hung up and headed back to the car.

(A minor aside here: as I walked across the parking lot of the convenience store to where I was parked, a man sitting in his car called me over to chat because he couldn't believe I was using a pay phone.)

Back at the car I told my wife about the stroke of genius that allowed us to finally get in touch with my son.

"So what's his apartment number?"

I hesitated.

"Um, I never asked. I just assumed he'd come down to meet us."