The Mulberry Bush

When I was a child, we’d make a circle and dance and sing a little song:

“Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush,
So early in the morning.”

That came to symbolize running around, going in circles, any pointless activity, any time spent going and going without accomplishing anything significant.

The other night I went out to dinner with my brother and his wife and another couple. We decided to go to a restaurant near my apartment. They had been there before, but I had not. My brother drove under the freeway, and, as he turned onto the access road, the man in the back seat called out, “Don’t go on the expressway. I know a short cut.”

Following his instructions, Don went to the next signal light, crossed back over the freeway, drove about five miles east, turned at an angle and went a couple of miles southeast, then turned back west for six or eight miles to get back to cross over the freeway again, where the restaurant faced the access road about two miles south of where our friend had told us, “Don’t go on the freeway.”

After a leisurely dinner – I had chicken marsala and took a whole breast home to heat in the microwave for supper tomorrow – I said to my brother as we left the restaurant, “Why don’t you turn onto the freeway to take me home?” He nodded, “That’s what I planned to do.”

By taking the “short cut,” we spent 25 minutes driving to the restaurant. On the freeway, it took about seven minutes to get back to my place.

Why did this friend think his circuitous route was a “short cut”? Perhaps from his house these were streets would have been more direct than going from my house. More likely, he directed us on a way that was familiar to him.

Similar misdirections have taken me out of my way several times since I moved to Texas three years ago. Once I knew how to negotiate the Dallas areas confusing tangle of roads and streets. But everything changed during the 50 years I lived in Chicago and Albuquerque. Nothing was familiar.

I bought a Mapsco and consulted it each time before I needed to drive to a new place. Then I would have as a passenger someone who has lived in this area for many years. I would be told, “Don’t go that way! You should go this way!”

Off we’d go on winding thoroughfares on routes that the map told me were miles in the wrong direction.

People become accustomed to certain streets, familiar routes to take them to the usual places – grocery stores, drugstores, Wal-Mart, the mall. They can’t find any place not on their usual pathways. Because they live near Beltline Road where it heads due south in Mesquite, they don’t realize it swings due west when it crosses Garland.

Some people become afraid to leave their own neighborhoods. When I lived in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a neighbor was surprised when I told her I had been to Haverford. “How brave you are!” she said, “I would never try to go there.”

(Haverford is not dangerous. It is one of Philadelphia’s “Main Line” suburbs, very upscale, like Dallas’s Highland Park, Detroit’s Gross Point, or Chicago’s North Shore.)

My neighbor knew that she could get in her car and drive east into Philadelphia, but she did not know she could turn left and follow the street into the Haverford, the very next suburb on the north. She had never been there because she simply would not try a new way of doing things.

The man who sent us “around the mulberry bush” to the restaurant is typical. People not only cling to old ways of going places, they don’t know there are different ways of thinking. They stubbornly refuse to consider alternatives in education, religion, politics – you name it. It simply never occurs to them that there are other ways of doing things that are as equally valid as “our way.” And some other ways are better!

That is not a lie!