Travel notes

PHILADELPHIA is where best-beloved daughter and Michael Brownstein recently celebrated their marriage, which in fact occurred one year ago, but they have their own version of chronology.

Philadelphia is where my ophidiophobic* sister and I were strolling beside the river when we saw a pudgy man striding along with a fat yellowish snake, about 8 feet long, wrapped around his waist and draped over his shoulder. He would periodically stop, look around to see who was watching, and then stroke his snake, call her a “lovely girl” and a “pretty missy” and then kiss her on the lips. Or the mouth. I don’t actually know if snakes have lips. My poor sister ran ahead in a state of profound misery. Instead of following to hold her hand, as a good sister would have done, I stayed behind to learn that the snake in question was an albino reticulated python, and that she had a very mellow temperament. I asked how one could discern a snake’s temperament. Her pudgy keeper told me that she liked to sit on the couch and watch reality television with him. As if that proved his point. I would like to say for the record that kissing your snake in public is not a good idea.

This is what an albino reticulated python looks like when she is not being kissed.

Philadelphia is also home to the Hyrtl Skull Collection, in the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians. The collection was amassed by Joseph Hyrtl. He was born in 1810 in Austria, where his father played the oboe in Count Esterhazy’s band. In university Hyrtl studied the osseous systems of fish and later collected over 800 fish skeletons. He also collected organs of hearing. But it is The Skulls for which he is best remembered. There are 139 skulls, mostly from Central and Eastern Europeans. And each one has a hand-written placard giving the nationality, the name, age, religion if known, occupation, means of death, and a description of any skeletal anomaly. In his collection there are 16 suicides and 11 executions. Here is a small sample of his captions:

Szigeth (Hungary or Romania)
Geza Uirenyi, 81; Reformist, herdsman. At age 70 attempted suicide by cutting his throat. Wound not fatal because of ossified larynx; laryngeal fistula remained. Lived until 80 without melancholy.

Prague
Araschtan Gottlieb, 19
Suicide by potassium cyanide because of suspected unfaithfulness of his mistress.

Magyar (Hungarian)
Jaska Soltesz, age 28
Reformist, soldier. Died of pneumonia.
Everted Gonial angles (bilateral); dental caries, potential abscessing.


Magyar (Hungary) from Transylvania
Ladislau Pal
Reformist, guerilla and deserter
Executed by hanging, 1861.
Bilateral flare of gonial angles.

North Hungary
Julius Farkas, 28
Protestant, soldier
Suicide by gunshot wound to the heart because of weariness of life.
Depressed nasal root.

*this is not the only thing she has in common with Indiana Jones.

Cartography

Maybe you were expecting a discourse on Ramon Lull, the alchemist turned saint whose feast it is, in which case you will be disappointed. If you are really desperate, check here, a year ago tomorrow.

This year I am in a geographical mode. I love maps. I think of myself as a cartographer manqué. I keep maps, I draw maps. I consider maps an art form and over the years I have subjected my family to shower curtains with world maps and plastic placemats with maps of the USA and tablecloths with maps of America’s vacationlands. I think the maps of ski areas make excellent wrapping paper. In the attic I still have the mouse nibbled maps I used to make in sixth grade geography class; they generally feature examples of a country or state’s primary products glued on (think cotton balls, wheat seeds, olives or French fashion); once I made a map of Africa with every country cut out of colored paper and then the whole continent fitted together like a puzzle. Projects like these were largely responsible for my not-enviable position as a teacher’s pet toady. Not enviable because the teacher in question was Sister Seven Sorrows and she had taken her vows before the Reformation.


The truth is that for all my love of maps, I am not a good draftsman and my maps are rarely accurate. Freehand I can approximate Africa, South America, the United States, and Italy. I need shapes with distinct protrusions : Florida or Texas, the Cape of Good Hope, the Horn, or the Boot. My best creations are the imaginary lands: Benaguay, Surlandia and the Wholly Sacred Empire of Walponia.
I copy maps.
But years ago Geoff drew them all freehand -- any country, region or city -- and now he is dead. On dinner napkins he could draw Europe in the Middle Ages with all the Papal states, or Manhattan with all the neighborhoods done in different colored crayons, even all the asymmetrical streets downtown. Perfectly proportioned outlines of the continents flowed from his fingers. I copy maps. Geoff had them in his head and now is buried.
Geoff went to Brown as a hockey star, became a classics scholar, fell in love with Alex who was my friend from Santa Barbara, and then went to law school.

When I saw the movie Philadelphia, so many years ago, based on Geoff's legal career, his wrongful dismissal lawsuit against the firm, and then his death, I was taken by surprise. It was not because I didn't expect to see Geoff and Alex transformed into movie stars, nor because they were called by the wrong names, but because I did not expect to be so stricken by the memory of Alex. The Geoff character in the movie didn't draw maps. At the time I considered that a grave artistic error; it always seemed to me, solipsistic as I am, the telling detail. But afterwards, when I heard that Geoff's family were suing the filmmakers, it became clear exactly why the maps weren't there: because they were the telling detail, they were the one thing that could have absolutely proven the family's case.
Even the trajectory from city to city is the kind of leap writers always make when they want their work to pass as fiction but can't help imposing the far-more-amazing truth: Providence was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams who'd been thrown out of Plymouth Colony, and he named his city Providence "in gratitude to his supreme deliverer", when it should have been gratitude to the Narragansett Indians who showed him the spring of fresh water at College Hill. Penn named Philadelphia after the city in Jordan (now called Amman) which Ptolemy II Philadelphus had named after himself, upon conquering the strategic seaport around 260 BC. Penn's appellation was meant to invoke the Hellenistic ideals of that great age. It is not known if Ptolemy, as in THE Ptolemy, cartographer and astronomer, was a descendant of the city-namer; but that's not what really matters, what matters is that he described the geo-centric universe, and that it stuck for over thirteen hundred years. He also seriously underestimated the size of the earth -- another wrong story.
In Paraguay – a landlocked country, hard to draw – they spell it Filadelfia.

For years I saved Geoff's dinner-spotted maps.

Imagine my delight upon discovering this beach towel with a map of El Salvador. Theoretically, one could lie on the black volcanic sand and learn geography at the same time. Except that one’s eyes are shut and one’s body is obscuring ¾ of El Salvador’s 20,972 square kilometers. Except that the beach towel is in El Salvador and we are here, where of course it is raining and beach towels are not called for.
And imagine my further delight on hearing just last night - in the marvelous Roundabout production of Waiting for Godot (catch it while you can) - that Estragon was also an aficionado of maps and in fact his small acquaintance with the Bible rested entirely on his fond recollections of colored maps of the Holy Land.
Now I must reprogram my brain to properly pronounce Godot as GOD-oh.