Doing A Columbus

Mention the name, Christopher Columbus, in most households and the reaction will be mild glee at the thought of a day away from school or work. The more historically-minded among us might even feel a tinge of nostalgia for the bygone schooldays in which the name evoked adventure, courage and discovery rather than greed, intolerance and violence.

But, mention the name in our house and family members run for the hills. It all began innocently enough several years ago, when my youngest child asked me to tell her "about Columbus," while we were sharing a pizza. I seem to recall that she was about to write a school paper at her Country Day & Bond Trading School and she had been hearing some pretty bad things about old Chris. My answer, apparently, was a little long-winded. Some have claimed that it was very long-winded, applying several thousand words towards a fifty-word answer.

This became known forever more as dad "doing a Columbus." After that pizza, and the long walk home that followed it, anyone in the family asking me a question, and there arose far fewer instances of this, prefaced it by saying, "Without doing a Columbus....can you explain the infield-fly rule....or ....without doing a C, who invented the SAT's and did they execute him/her for that?"

Let's just say that they were all thrilled when I took up writing three blogs, known affectionately in my own home as Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.  Now, I can do a Columbus and even, on occasion, get paid for it. Talk about gold in the Indies!

Somewhere between Samuel Eliot Morrison's view of CC as heroic "Admiral of the Ocean Sea" and contemporary scholars' venom against CC's "capitalist, colonialist empiricism" lies a pretty simple truth: here was a fairly gutsy European human, who had one very good idea about the earth's roundness keeping  his ships from tumbling off into space. He was right about that.

As for finding a direct route to the Indies, we can say that in a real sense, he failed. How was he to know that there was a land mass, which would one day become one huge SUV parking lot and mortgage swindling emporium! Where's Leif Ericson when you need him!

But seriously, Friends. We hear a lot of advice today from experts on how we can "transition" our lives, and a lot of this advice includes first becoming familiar with failure, as odd as that may sound. I have more than trifling experience with this method, as it happens, and I cannot yet say if there is indeed a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of many small failures. But, we could do a lot worse than take a look at Columbus's example of imagination, courage, determination as we sail our own little boats to a million different versions of the "Indies."

As usual, Saint Robert of Hibbing, who is still strumming in his cave high above the river,  weighs in on this brilliantly if not so clearly:

                                "....She knows there's no success like failure
                                   and that failure's no success at all...."

Still, we must sail along our routes, somehow keeping our crews from hunger, mutiny, and not seeing this week's JCrew catalogue.

 I like to think of Chris, alone each night in his bunk (protective dagger under his pillow) praying for a sign that he was not really off his rocker, or the Italian equivalent of that. And, I think of him on that morning, when the call came from the crow's nest high above him that land had been sighted. Phew! That was a close one!

I do not think that  he really failed in any meaningful way in that moment, especially since that landfall turned out to be close-by my beloved Bahamian isle of "Saint James."  Those of us who land in unlikely places, which may be different form the ones we set out to find, may discover that "doing A Columbus" is not so bad after all.

We'd do well, I think, to just say Amen,  and get on with living on the rock we have found.