Heather, I just want to acknowledge how much you’ve changed my life. Ever since you somehow crawled behind the dashboard of my car in 2002, you’ve guided me around the country and around the block, saving me anguish and gasoline, and helping in your sweet little way to improve my life and keep my emissions lower.

Over the years I’ve come to love your high, oddly clipped voice and your gentle prompts: “In a half a mile turn right,” “U-turn, when you can. U-turn.”

You may be bossy, but you always speak  with assurance. “At the next  intersection, bear left.” Ah yes, you know when to bear rather than turn. Such nuanced instructions.

Because I’m alone and rarely have a partner in my car, I used to hesitate driving in the dark to places I had never been. But Heather, since I have known that you were there in the dashboard behind the little map that keeps shifting above the CD player, I drive with impunity even where the streets are numbered on little white stones that no one can make out unless you get out of the car because the fancy-schmancy neighborhood doesn’t want anyone around who doesn’t  live there already, or who doesn't perform services for those lucky few who do.

You’ve shown them. You’ve gotten me door to door without a mistake. You not only keep the world greener, you democratize things, path-finding roads where few would venture before.

You’ve gotten me to loading docks in mazes of warehouses, and though complicated office parks to the correct door, and through rain and fog and sleet and snow with the dedication of an old-time mail carrier.

Oh yes, there was an occasional detour when I wound up on a street I had never seen where weeds grew in the tarmac cracks, and the folks walking around looked like they had just escaped from a high-security prison, and you said, “Destination ahead, Destination” and you were wrong and I was frightened .

But mistakes like that are few, Heather, and your voice remains so sweet that I always forgive you. Ninety percent, okay, make that ninety-five percent of the time, you deposit me right where I need to go, without my having to worry about a thing except the driving.

You’ve freed me from having to take long calls with wrong directions when I have no way to write them down, and from maps that never refold, and from stops to ask directions from well-meaning people who send me the opposite way from where I need to go and cause me to lose the job that would have changed my career path.

You’ve gotten me around beltways and clover-loops and inner and outer circles. And even though you can be a nag and you never admit a mistake, you have saved me time and gas and the other kind of gas and anxiety, without a waver in your steady voice.

And when I haven’t listened to you and I plunged ahead stubbornly, you have managed to configure the map without saying, “You idiot, I said turn right.” You simply change your instructions, and get me there anyway in your same few words.

Heather, I have come to depend on you as a wise guide. In fact, I wish you could  tell me what to do with my remaining funds, and who to meet and what to eat, and where to move, and how to live, and what is the secret to success, and how the universe expanded and if there is life after death.

But for now I’ll settle for you getting me from point A to point B with a “Destination ahead” in that high voice that I have come to love.