After a 20-month layoff, I knew my memory might need some refreshing. Many places would be no trouble since I had delivered to them hundreds of times over twenty years. But what of the once-a-year holiday specials and the connecting routes less travelled?

Having grown up in the Age of Rand McNally, I kept street atlases of five New England states in the company van.  Three were well-worn by about 2004, after which I consulted them only when we added a new customer.

That was about when we added one in Rhode Island, and one of my employers came to me with a print-out of step-by-step directions to it. You know, one that begins by telling you which way to turn out your driveway. Maybe it’s because I live on an island with just a single road to the mainland, but these things drive me up a bridge abutment. To reach anyplace you can name on the North American continent, I’m given three instructions to get to a bridge I can see out my living room window. Give me a clutch!

Such had to be the look on my face when he, with all good intention, handed me that drivel. He laughed, but he never made the mistake again. Anyway, the blank back-sides did come in handy as scrap paper when I had lunch later on in Cafe Assisi, so all’s well that ends with eggplant parmesan.

On my second day back since the COVID shutdown, I was dispatched to a new drop, as we call them in shipping and receiving. An address that I vaguely recalled as in an industrial park I knew reasonably well.  Wanting to be sure, I started reaching for my maps not long after I drove off, but they were nowhere to be found.

Well, I was in need of coffee, and I had no trouble remembering where I’d find a Starbucks–two, in fact–conveniently just off the interstate before I reached that park. Why not look at the invoice and give them a call? 

After some fumbling attempts on the company cellphone, the call went through.  Because I’m one of the few remaining Americans who neither has, nor wants, nor will ever shackle myself with a cellphone, it took a while to recall how to call.

A cheery “Hello, this is…” was in my ear after an obligatory minute of phone-menu limbo, and the receptionist was delighted to learn who I was.  Who wouldn’t be when you’re about to roll 500 pounds of chocolate and fudge into their offices?

When I mentioned directions, she asked, “Do you have GPS?”

Brand new just before COVID put the brakes on everything, the van probably does have it, but being too proud of my McNally nature to admit I’m unfit for this Age of Alexa, I simply said no.

She then conferred with a woman sitting nearby.  From their voices, I’d say both were mid-20s, and it was clear that the second had pulled a map onto her screen and was describing it to the first who repeated it to me.  So I heard it all twice. I appreciated their kind effort, but this doesn’t register visually for a McNallian–until I heard a street-name, twice, that triggered my memory. So I thought I’d make it easy:

“Yes,” I cut in, “I know that exit. The one with the rotary, right?”

“That’s it!”

“Okay! Just tell me if I go north or south of the interstate. That’s all I need.”

“Um, north?”

Right. Alexans don’t do north, south, east, or west, but my McNallian memory offered further detail: Stressing a word that now qualifies as bi-geolingual, I asked: “Do I go toward downtown Woburn or toward Wilmington?”

As soon as I heard the one-name answer, I preempted the step-by-step Alexan litany that she was already starting: “Thank you! Thank you both! I’ll recognize it from there. See you in a bit.”

And I did recognize the turn to the industrial park, which isn’t that large, so an extra turn around the block due to one wrong guess didn’t delay me more than a minute. As an unintended benefit, the call may have been the reason a couple young guys were standing out on the loading dock. For all I know, I was their excuse to have a cigarette break, but that’s fine by me. They come in quite handy when you’re rolling into a place with 500 pounds of cargo.

Rip Van Winkle may have been baffled after his 20-year snooze, so I shouldn’t worry over twenty months of sleeping in. Such tricks as calling ahead–even when I know damn well exactly where I’m going–will make this easy.

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I’d use the word mini-van to describe these low-to-the-ground Ford Transits, but that word is for something else quite different.

On the very first day I drove it, a Mendon policeman stopped me on a back road, probably doing 45 past signs saying 30. He seemed forgiving, no doubt because he had watched me go by in the larger vans on that same road many times.

No, he wouldn’t remember me, but words like “fudge” and “chocolate” have a way of sticking in the memory no matter the size of the vehicle carrying it. As surely as being asked every day, more than once, if you are “giving away free samples.” But I could tell he didn’t pull me over to ask for buttercrunch or coconut cream.

“Sorry, I got carried away,” I began. (Always begin with Sorry, and always keep talking until they interrupt.) Quickly, I told him it was so much easier to handle than the full-size cargo vans I had been driving for some twelve years, that it felt like a sports van.

He lit up with a smile when I used–coined?–that term, and interrupted to let me know he was issuing just a warning. Since then, I have waved to him as I go by, but never hit the horn. That would be pressing my luck as well as the horn.

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In Marshfield, a policeman pulled up aside me while I was stopped in a parking lot consulting a map. The cafe where I liked to consult maps over falafel wraps was itself wrapped by a chain-link fence and yellow tape, and when a police cruiser suddenly appeared right next to me with its window sliding down and the cop leaning over for a talk… Well, let’s just say your mind can go awry when that happens.

Did he think I had done whatever had done in the building, that this was a classic case of “returning to the scene of the crime”? I didn’t wait for him to speak:

“Sorry! Dispatch told me to get here ASAP, and I guess I didn’t.”

He started laughing. That’s an even better time to stop. No, I hadn’t screeched in too fast or failed to use a signal. He just wanted a photograph.

By this time, I was already used to it. Cars pull up beside me on the interstates for as long as it takes for passengers to snap the pics they want. Other cars race by with people laughing, pointing, giving thumbs up. People are photographing it when I return from a delivery. If I’m there, they’ll ask permission.

More than once, some guy or gal will be squatting by the van’s side, adjusting lenses for some desired angle, then shifting for another, readjusting, and so on. Quietly, I’ll stop and stand behind them with the two-wheeler until they stand up–and are startled by my presence. As dryly as I can, I always speak first:

“Are you finished?”

Some will start to apologize, so you quickly laugh it off. Thankfully, most get the joke, so you crack another:

“May I go now?”

What they want, of course, is the sign my employers put on it. Two of them are volunteer fire-fighters, one a former ambulance driver, and they may have thought it an inside joke for their fellow first-responders. They even put a backward “chocolate” between the headlights. Wonder if the only reason it doesn’t have a siren and a bubble gum light is because they figured I might use them.

Also wonder if it occurred to them that it would be I, not they, who would absorb all the laughter their shiny new object would cause.

Whatever the case, “Emergency Fudge Response Vehicle” now challenges the fish shack in Rockport out on the tip of Cape Ann–Massachusetts’ other cape–as the most photographed object in the state.

For artists with their canvases, the shack is known as “Motif #1.” That would make the van “Motif #2,” but it moves too fast to be painted. And you better believe I’ll keep pedal to the metal to keep it that way because the term number two has a most unfortunate other meaning.

Kinda like mini-van.