It's an old line and, really, not all that funny, but I actually heard it said...in all seriousness...when I was a kid. I was standing outside a grocery store with my mom and the market's "box boy" who was about 74 years of age, when a car with out-of-state plates pulled up next to us. "Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to.....?" asked the driver, mentioning some town I'd never heard of. Our older friend, put the grocery bags into our car, turned to the stranger, stroked his snow-white, chin-whiskers, took a puff on his corn-cob pipe and said "You can't get there from here." (Okay, he didn't really stroke his chin-whiskers or have a corn-cob pipe, but it sure adds to the Norman Rockwell-esque quality of the story, don't you think?) He did claim there was not a way to get to where the driver wanted to go, however. And, he was serious. He probably meant there was no easy way to travel and, back then, that was true. Now, for example, there is a multi-lane highway from my hometown into the city but when I was a kid it felt like you were jumping on the Nina, Pinta or Santa Maria if you had to drive into the big town. You had to go over Springfield Hill, on narrow lanes with farm equipment popping up everywhere. It was quite treacherous and led many of us to conclude that, sure you could probably get there from here, but why chance it?

Now, for a rhetorical detour: I clearly remember the aforementioned trip to the grocery store because my mom bought me a can of Popeye Spinach. When we got home, I asked her to open the can so I could wolf it down in one gulp...like Popeye. She warned me that it may not be exactly what I thought it would be but let me try it. I don't know how The Sailor Man did it...for me, most of the green stuff ended up in the sink. It did nothing for my biceps or triceps or any other ceps I may have. Frankly, I am considering starting a class action law-suit against Pop-Eye and his canned spinach for false and misleading advertising. I believed it would be, essentially, "muscles in a can." It was not. (I also tried Wheaties once hoping to be a champion at something...anything...didn't happen, either.) Looking back, I realize that my true role model was never going to be Popeye, anyway. As I've gotten older, rounder, balder and blinder, I realize that my inner child related more to Wimpy. I've even applied his "I will kindly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" philosophy to my bill-paying techniques. Anyway, my spinach-based he-man theory was a failure and I quickly returned to the curative powers of Oreos, M&M's, and chocolate milk. I also ate a lot of peanut butter, but only Skippy because I could never quite trust a guy in green tights who hung out with someone named Tinkerbell. Sorry, Peter Pan. I was just too macho a four-year-old, for you. This section really has nothing to do with the rest of the blog but it did mention the word spinach, which makes it topical and more worthy of a spot on KMBC's website.

Back to going nowhere, fast: I have thought a lot about that "can't get there" story over the last few weeks because it has felt that, no matter what street, road, highway or interstate you travel lately, you can't really go directly anywhere. It's times like these, we really appreciate Johnny Rowlands and NewsChopper 9. If I could just convince him to hover over my car at all times, I'd feel much more confident. I actually encountered a detour from a detour the other day. At one point, I had to turn off a main thoroughfare into a neighborhood and got completely turned around. I was driving up and down cul-de-sacs for about 20 minutes. Everytime I'd see one of those "This Neighborhood Calls The Police...." signs I'd get nervous...sure that someone would see this odd car with the even odder driver. The kicker on this particular "lost in (green)-space" episode is that once I'd finally found my way out of the neighborhood, I was right back at the original detour. At that point, I think I blacked-out because I have no memory of how I actually got home.

If that spinach idea had worked maybe I could just hoist the car over my head and run through the orange barrels. But, it didn't and, now, spinach is becoming the hot Halloween costume because it is so scary. In troubling traffic times like these, I guess, we all need to be patient, drive slowly and carefully around the construction sites, leave a little early and, maybe, best of all, just stay home. Neither one of my grandmas ever drove a car...legally...and they didn't seem to miss out on much. Maybe Popeye can help us after all...just apply his take-life-as-it-comes philosophy to the current state of road construction mania :"It is what it is and I 'yam what I 'yam." That's IT! Yams. Maybe yams would give me muscles! Now, if I can just figure a way to get to the store.