Better than a Golden Globe…

Postscript: Today's article is not funny. But it is real.

A globe in a man’s office is a mark of distinction. It is the mark of an educated dreamer, an accomplished artist with a white collar, and a thousand other paradoxes.

It should not come as any surprise that Hollywood seized the globe and tried to make it a symbol of their own. Legitimizing the self-absorbed, destructive personalities produced by America’s darling industry on the west coast with an award that says nothing more than “you’re cool this week; please come to my party” is irony at least; that the award is given to American-made, English-language films is only the tip of the iceberg of hypocrisy. It is an indictment of our civilization that putting the name of a soon to be washed-up, divorced, rehabbed, and probably prematurely dead celebrity on a globe adds E-bay value faster than gold itself.

When I was young, I spun a globe that was tucked away in the classroom corner and imagined the places I would go. My finger would stop the globe on Germany, Japan, Chile, Mexico, Canada, and even the Island that decorates the southern tip of China, and I would imagine the sights, smells, and food, the sounds of a language I did not know. I wondered how I would get there, what I would do, who I would meet, what I would learn.

Now that I am grown, I still spin a Globe. It is a small one; it sits in the corner of the Vice President’s office. But when my finger stops the globe, instead of imagining, it calls back the memories. It reminds me of how people work, live, talk, eat, and travel. It brings back raw fish and taxi rides and business meetings and walking long streets. You see, I have been to all of those places, and more.

I love to point a spot out on a globe or a map to my children, share a story, and impart a little wisdom that came at a cost to me.

In Shanghai I was tricked in to getting in to a taxi… it cost me a lot of money to get out of it. I ended up running part of a charity race in Birmingham in the UK… with my luggage. We climbed far beyond where the tourists go on the Great Wall north of Beijing. And our weak German skills ordered way more orange juice than a couple of people can drink at McDonalds in Hannover. I have a fond memory of a long walk early one morning in Kyoto, Japan, when I managed to escape my hosts long enough to see the parts of the city that aren’t on a tourist map, and greet people as they began their day early one Sunday morning. I spent a long night walking around Mexico City looking for a hotel when mine couldn’t find a reservation. I have visited the poorest slums in Chile, and I have been treated like a king in Montreal.

And then my finger finds a spot on the globe that my feet have not yet touched. Vienna. Prague. Johannesburg. Reykjavik. And the child inside returns.

I am one of the paradoxes. And one day there will be a Replogle Globe, sitting by my bookshelves in the room with the wingback chair and the grand piano.