I used to get lost a lot as a kid.
One time I was shopping with my mom at Albertson's, completely engrossed in the visual spectacle that is the cereal aisle: Captain Crunch with his array of golden medals and badges, Sugar Bear with his contagious enthusiasm for sugar -- when suddenly I realized that my mom was nowhere in sight. The cereal world had put me in a good mood, so I didn’t panic. I wandered over to the next aisle, and there, in my child’s highly-fluid sense of reality, I thought I saw my mom. She looked kind of like my mom; actually it was another woman roughly my mom’s age. I ran up to her, wrapped my arms around her legs, and gazed up at her adoringly. “Oh MOM, there you are! I LOVE YOU!!” I declared. The woman smiled blissfully.
But then slowly, as in a dream where a familiar face incrementally morphs into another, more sinister face, she started to look very much unlike my mom! And just at that moment my real mom arrived. “Tommy, leave that poor woman alone and come over here!” A wave of embarrassment washed over me. I was embracing the panty-hosed lower body of another kid’s mom! I unhinged myself from the fake mom’s legs and rejoined the familiar universe of my real mother.

About six years later, we were on a family vacation at Disneyland. We had checked into the Disneyland Hotel only hours before, and were walking to a nearby complex of restaurants to have dinner. Somehow I found myself separated from my family, wondering just what I was expected to do. Maybe they’d said I was supposed to meet them somewhere? Just then a long tourist shuttle pulled up. A megaphoned voice announced that it was heading to “Disney’s Magic Kingdom.” Several people got on. I decided that the best course of action would be to join them.
The shuttle was just about to pull away, irretrievably thrusting me into the teeming multitudes of The Happiest Place on Earth, when my older brother spotted me and shouted, “GET OFF THAT THING, TOM! NOW!“ I probably would have been swallowed up forever into the magical world of Disney, forced to reenact scenes from Snow White or recruited against my will into a gang of Lost Boys, if he hadn’t rescued me in the nick of time.

But the worst experience of all was when I found myself all alone in the middle of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. I was twelve. Williamsburg is a historic “town” faithfully designed to recreate the gemeinschaft and folkways of colonial America in the 18th century. My brother and I had just finished watching the blacksmith construct a pair of horseshoes, and he wanted to go look at another exhibit. He said something about where we’d meet, but I didn’t get it. I went across the way to the basketmaker’s, and when I returned my brother had disappeared.
I wasn’t too worried at first; surely I’d run into him or my parents at some point down the road. But colonial Williamsburg is a vast region of coopers, foundaries, gunsmiths, milliners, and apothecary shoppes, and no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find them anywhere. I walked among the tourists, wigmakers and indentured servants, past ladies in hoop skirts and petticoats, buckle-shoed congrefsmen, shoemakers and guild masters, feeling like a time traveller who had lost the technology to return home. Other families were getting their pictures taken in shackles, a fife and drum corps swept through the neighborhood. I was a social outcast and I would be stranded here forever. Waistcoated men in their breeches and spatterdashes and puffy shirts surrounded me, women with mob caps and ostentatious buttoned bodices strutted by. The day wore on and still I was lost. It was oppressive and alienating.
The sun began to descend. I had been in the 18th century the entire day and I was fed up with it. I was standing there on the corner of some gated cobblestone street looking over at the College of William and Mary when a twentieth century squad car drove up and stopped next to me. “Is your name Tom?” the policeman asked me. “Yea,” I replied, tentatively. “Well your parents have been wondering where you are,” he said. “Get in, I‘ll drive you to them.” He drove me to the condo complex just outside of colonial times where we were staying. I was grateful to be in the land of electricity and bellbottomed pants again.