My Imaginary Friend

I have an imaginary friend, Christopher Columbus. The central achievement in his life is the very paradigm of a method of discovery practiced by personalities as diverse as Johan Sebastian Bach and Art Tatum-- find a key and land on it. The beauty and romance of his great adventure echoes to this very day in the greeting, heard throughout the Spanish speaking world, "Santa Maria, que pinta nia." Curious, is it not, how the most beautiful memories of Western civilization are associated with boating. First there was Helen of Troy and her, "face that launched a thousand ships." Then there was Chris and his three boat butt. All Americans, at about the age when they become verbal, learn a lovely poem that is, to us, a constant reminder of the approximate date that Chris set sail: In fourteen hundred and ninety three Columbus sailed the wide blue sea We are also taught that we should like him a lot because he discovered America. This is perhaps a tad overstated. But then, as his invisible friend, Maxwell Smart, used to say of Chris, "he missed it by that much." It was never explained in my class how a guy could "discover" a place that other people were living in when he got there-- so that confused me through much of my childhood. Much later, in my adult life, I learned that Chris and his sailing buddies did their level best to close the credibility gap by killing all of the Taino people.

My teachers always reminded us once a year, on Columbus day, that Chris was the smartest Italian in the the world back then, being the only one that could figure out that the earth was shaped more like a ball than like a pancake. Evidently there is something in the constitution of elementary school teachers that predisposes them to steer clear of Greek history. Else they could not have avoided learning that the correct shape of the Earth was known to scholars of the 4th century BCE. The average navigator back when my friend was working (yes, despite the assessment of my teachers, even the Italian navigators) was evidently better schooled in Greek history than the average American elementary school teacher is today. They tried to tell Chris that his calculation of the distance of the longest leg his voyage was off, in units that we use today, by about 10,000 statute miles, and that he would have used up all the food and water his boats could carry somewhere between the Canary Islands and Japan. They probably based this on the diameter of the Earth as calculated by Eratosthenes in the 2nd century BCE. I'm no navigator; however, based on my experience with pizza, even I know what two pie are. Lately some Americans have been trash talking Chris. So, his geography was a little off! Maybe he did not know the difference between Jamaica and India. But did he let that stop him? No. He did not let that stop him. Chris, better than any of my other imaginary friends, is a great example of the spirit that made our country great. When life handed Chris lemons, he got him some slaves to make lemonade.