It’s almost hard to imagine now that there was a time long ago when I couldn’t just jump into a car and drive aimlessly, which is something I do very often. Luckily, it’s hard to miss something that you never had, so I was blissfully unaware for the first sixteen years of my life of how great it is to be able to go anywhere at any time. My scope of the world surrounding me, seen always from the passenger side window or backseat, was all in the hands of my parents. I went where they went, when they wanted to go there. My best friend Dan and I accepted it as a necessary inconvenience. We bided our time at home with toys, TV, video games, walks in the woods, and crank-calling strangers. I in particular spent a lot of time perfecting my aim with rubber bands by spending long winter afternoons shooting rolls of thread off the top of an easy chair. But it was frustrating. There was a whole world out there outside of walking distance, and we both knew it, and we wanted to see it for ourselves.

We lived in the outer reaches of the suburbs, and anything as interesting as a shopping mall was far, far out of our reach. Opportunities to further complete our growing collection of Star Wars action figures seemed frustratingly few and far between. It involved a confluence of many factors: A parent who was willing to drive all the way out to the mall, usually for a reason of their own, and that parent’s willingness to let me tag along. If I was brought along, there was always that horrifying possibility that I’d have to wait patiently while my mother touched every piece of clothing in the women’s section of every department store, or while my dad looked at ten different kinds of socket wrenches in the Sears hardware section for a length of time that just couldn’t seem possible, and still with no guarantee that we’d ever make into a toy store at all. There was no telling when such an occasion would come again, so getting driven to a mall and coming home empty handed was an absolute disgrace, a precious opportunity squandered. It was a very stressful process. I learned very early that having a goal you want to achieve is a roller coaster ride of elation and heartbreak, especially when success hinges on the mysterious and unpredictable nature of adults.

The roads around where I lived were, and still are, simple two-lane arteries cutting through hilly, bumpy green land that was once completely covered with trees and coursing with streams. The streets seem almost random in their creation, as if the road workers simply paved over paths that were created by deer and other woodland creatures hundreds of years ago. To this day I still don’t know the names of most of those roads, but by the time I’d gotten my license, I knew exactly how to get where I was going by years of having been driven there. At the bottom of one steep hill near my house was a fork in the road that led off in three directions. Most of the time, mom or dad would continue on driving straight. I knew that a left turn was a route that eventually ended up meeting with another well-known, nameless road. But my friend Dan and I one day realized that neither one of us had ever been in a car that turned right at the fork. It was a revelation. This small intersection was mere miles from our houses. How could we not know where a right turn led? Dan’s theory was that down that road and around the bend was a huge toy store. In fact, probably the greatest toy store in the world, like in the movie Big, with a giant piano that you could dance on, and three floors at least, and free samples just for visiting. I decided to accept Dan’s theory as fact and assume it to be true.

Asking our parents what the mystery road held in store was, we both knew, pointless. We didn’t even try. If they’d managed to get where they were going their whole lives without turning right at that stop sign, they were never going to just tell us about what really hid around that curve. As time went by, the fantasies of what was down there became more fantastic. In addition to the toy store, there had to be some kind of amusement park. I couldn't figure out why we wouldn’t be able to hear the sounds of the roller coasters and firework shows during the summer, but then it hit me: It’s probably a water park. Being that we both had perfectly good swimming pools in our back yards, I could understand, but not abide by, our parents’ attempts to keep this area of town off limits to our young eyes.

I’m not going to tell you that as soon as I got my license, the first thing I did was to drive to that fork and turn right. By the time I turned sixteen, I wouldn’t have had use for a toy store even if one happened to be down that road, greatest one in the world or not. If I had made the drive, I would have been more likely to be staking out private places for parking the car and making out. It turns out a cousin of mine actually moved into a house down that road right around the time I got my license. He hosted a party, and so my first time witnessing the scenery around the curve was from the backseat of my parents' car on the way there. Down the tree-lined two-lane road we drove, around the bend, to find more trees and more road, and then more trees, and then, eventually, a housing plan.

I’ve wasted a lot of gas and put a lot of miles on my car in the sixteen-plus years since I’ve become a legal driver wandering around, purposely getting lost, or just re-driving roads that I’ve been down hundreds of times, for no reason. Maybe somewhere in my mind I hope that one of these days I’m going to go around a bend and find that mythical greatest toy store in the world.