I should tell you upfront that I once got turned around in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. Not on the way in. On the way out. I had eaten biscuits, I was content, and somehow I walked through the wrong door and spent a full minute wandering past the rocking chairs and the little pegboard triangle game before my wife found me.

This is who I am. I have made peace with it.

I come from a long line of confident navigators who were frequently wrong. My father could point north with absolute certainty in any weather, any state, any terrain — and he was wrong about half the time, which, if you think about it, is exactly what you’d expect from random chance. The confidence was the thing, though. You never doubted him until you were already forty minutes in the wrong direction, and by then it felt rude to bring it up.

I inherited the confidence. I did not inherit whatever compass lives in sensible people’s chests.

These days I use my phone like everyone else, which helps enormously except for the moments when it announces, with great serenity, that I should turn right just as I am passing a river. I have learned that the little blue arrow knows where I am approximately the way I know where my reading glasses are — directionally correct, imprecise in the details.

What I have noticed, over years of mild geographic humiliation, is that getting lost is rarely as catastrophic as it feels. You see something you wouldn’t have seen. You slow down. You ask a stranger, which is its own small grace, the kind that reminds you that most people are quietly happy to help if you give them the chance.

I asked a man at a gas station outside of Mocksville once, and he not only gave me directions but walked me to my car, pointed at the horizon, and said, You’ll know the turn because there’s a mailbox shaped like a bass. There was. It was magnificent.

I still get turned around. I still occasionally exit buildings into the wrong century. But I have decided that a man who knows exactly where he’s going at all times is missing something — some texture, some dependence, some excuse to notice the bass-shaped mailboxes of the world.

Also, the biscuits at Cracker Barrel are genuinely very good, and perhaps I was not lost so much as lingering.