Typos. Ugh. (Detour #6)

Why didn’t somebody tell me? Arrgh. I just found a typo in one of my previous posts, one of those sound-alike words that makes sense to spell check but is nothing but wrong to the human eye. I feel like my post was all dressed up to go out in public and nobody told me my slip was showing. Okay, I’m not perfect. My eyes are middle-aged and I’ve never learned how to get all the smudges off my reading glasses, so there’s that. And I have a tendency to live inside my head, where the words are always what I meant to say and not the weirdness that staggers out onto the computer screen. I can’t trust my brain. It has its own corrective software, and is always re-coding the data received through my eyes with bits and bytes leftover from Lord knows where. Have you ever seen a plastic bag caught on an electric line or a barbed wire fence? That’s how my brain works, just grabbing things that don’t belong and letting them hang there until the wind shifts.

Which is why I’m glad we went to the Branson Landing last weekend and I saw this sign:

Is it mean of me to take pleasure in other people’s typos? Then I’m mean, because there’s something very satisfying in knowing it’s not just me, and even a big time development company can budget for some fancy signs, approve the artwork, cut the check, and end up with cooridor instead of corridor. Typos happen; they just do. And sometimes they’re delightful, as when my nephew sent me this text last week:

He meant dog. But the wind shifted when I read his text, and my brain let go of its plastic bag and made room for my nephew’s image instead, with my nephew’s wife on one side and God on the other, standing luminous and tall. I’ll need to vacuum if God is coming by. And maybe bake a cake.

If a typo is a literary detour then it can’t be all bad, can it? Detours take us places we’d never think to go, and sometimes evil lives in those places, but mostly goodness peeks out from the shadows of the detour, waiting only for a smile to be lured into the light. Maybe I should have gone through the gate with the cooridor sign to see what lay down that alley. Who knows what adventures I would find?

For the record, the Landing is lovely on the public side of its mystery gates. It lies at the bottom of Branson’s historic main street and stretches out along the banks of a narrow branch of Lake Taneycomo. A department store anchors one end and Bass Pro Shops anchors the other, with lots of restaurants and specialty shops filling in the spaces in-between. There’s a Joe’s Crab Shack, Cantina Laredo, Black Oak Grill and a dozen more places to eat, most of them with some sort of view of the

lake. As you walk along the Landing’s pedestrian pathway, you’ll catch glimpses of the water through the openings cut out between the shops, and bands play at the open-air theater midway down the strip. Waters dance there too, huge gushing fountains timed to the music. When the skies are sunny or the stars are out, it’s a perfect place to be. Whoever’s in charge at the Landing—you did yourself proud. Even typos can’t keep a good tourist destination down. Let’s hope the same is true for a blog.

Peace.