This event happened to me about a year ago, but I forgot to blog it at the time.

There is a blind man named Eliezer who comes to this area for shabbat periodically. He usually gets a ride home from paratransit, but on this particular weekend, the paratransit van had a breakdown across town, and wouldn’t be available for several hours. I offered to give Eliezer a ride home, and it was then that I learned what should perhaps be a new rule for life: “never get directions from a blind man.”

I hadn’t heard of the street on which Eliezer lived (it was one of the many small streets that exist for only a few blocks in West Philadelphia, and although he had a rough idea of where it was, he could not give exact directions. The first attempt was doomed to failure as while we were going south on one of the numbered streets he didn’t recognize the names of any of the named streets we crossed (none were his street, as we were hoping), and we ended up too far south, and had to get on I-76 and loop around. The second time I decided to take Baltimore ave west until we hit one of the numbered streets that he lived between and then take that until we found his street. He kept saying that from Baltimore I had to “turn left and then left again”. I inquired if I had to turn immediately onto some other street, but he said no, I simply had to turn onto 58th and then turn left again. This made little sense to me and Eliezer could provide little explanation as to what he meant. When I finally got to 58th I made my left, and while about halfway through the turn Eliezer said “good, now keep turning”. To me this comment didn’t make a lot of sense as had I stopped turning I would have driven through the front of a Chinese restaurant, but then I realized that 58th and Baltimore don’t intersect at right angles. The turn I was making was significantly more than 90*. While to me this was barely of note, to Eliezer this was a significantly different turn from most turns, and that is why he felt as if we were turning twice.

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