Hello Columbus
I love globes; I always have. In my kids' classrooms or a library, I've always gone for the globe.
I wrote a column about this particular passion once, and a week later one arrived in the mail, a gift from my sister.
So I began writing about my love of Porsches. No luck so far.
My globe sits on my desk, where I can daydream. Right now I'm looking at Mauritania, which for those of you who don't have globes or sisters is southwest of Morocco. In the El Djouf Desert, in case that helps.
I have at my fingertips, then, the answers to ancient mysteries. There is no Northwest Passage. There is no Great Southern Continent, at least not where people thought there might be. The quickest way between two points is, apparently, a canal.
Africa, of which Mauritania is a small but (I'm sure) important part, is very big. According to my fingertips, I could fit all of North America, including Dave Pollard, inside Africa and still have room for Brazil if people were willing to squeeze.
This wasn't the case according to old maps, on which Africa seemed smaller than Europe, which would be funny except I'm pretty sure the French had something to do with this. On old maps, France was huge.
This has nothing to do with anything, except I'm looking at my globe and thinking. Payson, Arizona, isn't on it. Phoenix is, and Tucson and the Gila River and the Grand Canyon, but not Payson.
The French were not involved with this, I think.
Payson is where I was this past week, a small town of a few thousand souls and a cemetery on a hill, where we buried my father on Monday. A speck on even a map of Arizona, yet big enough to hold a lot of my relatives and someone I hadn't seen in a very long time.
We went to high school together, this woman and I, and while our old neighborhood was only 100 miles away it still seemed odd. She moved to Payson in April, about the time my dad was diagnosed with cancer, and read the obituary in the paper on Sunday. She didn't know Dad, but came anyway. Just because she once knew me and my brother and sister a bit, years ago.
And, for reasons that are too complicated and too boring to explain, it turned out she was someone I really needed to see at that moment. So I sit tonight and spin my globe, thinking. There are really a lot of places to be.
Columbus was heading for Japan, you know. He was looking for a new route east, of course, but he headed south for the Canary Islands, matched the latitude and aimed west for Japan. Daytona Beach was in the way, is all. And Texas and northern Mexico. That's okay. I've made the same mistake, sort of.
I love the humanness of Columbus. Drake, Magellan, Cook: These were explorers. Columbus was a dreamer, an ideologue who attempted to proof-text geography to get an answer he wanted. Four times he made the trip, and four times he rationalized and equivocated and just plain made things up. Asia was out there somewhere, by God, and the fact that America stood in his way wasn't about to change his mind.
He eventually decided that perhaps he'd run into Paradise, an earthly realm of angels and souls that no man could enter. Somewhere in the immediate neighborhood of Japan. You gotta love Columbus.
I'm stretching this all out of shape myself, trying to make a point that I'm not quite sure of, so I'll stop. Except to say that we all have journeys, and that no matter how carefully we plot our course and envision our destination, things always pop up unexpectedly and in the most unusual places. These are hazards or problems or blessings, but like Columbus I guess you could speculate that God plopped them down in our path, and I guess tonight I wouldn't argue with you.
9:19:21 AM 
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