The Bridge

continued

And with this realization, the world in my head reassembled itself. Like all American school kids in the 1930s and '40s, I'd grown up gazing at a Mercator Projection wall map of the world: the United States at the center, symmetrically framed by oceans, Europe off on the right, Asia on the left. Now I felt geography come apart, slide, and shift like the ice breaking up on the river beneath us.

When the motion stopped, Paris was at the center. I felt the vast Eurasian continent stretching eastward thousands of miles to the Pacific. Saw America somewhat as I'd always thought of Australia, far away across an endless expanse of sea. I felt the ache of those many-times-great-grandparents when the sons and daughters who were my ancestors left the farms and villages that had been home time out of mind.

All this just crossing a bridge.

"Can we walk a little faster?" John said. "My ears are freezing."

We strode briskly along the rue de Rivoli while I wondered how to explain that, suddenly, I didn't want a berth on a boat. The ticket office was just ahead. But now it was John who slowed his pace.

"Honey," he said, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, "I don't know how to put this. I know you want to go home, and I thought I did too. But just on the way here, all at once I knew -- this is home."

This is the way perspective changes, the saints tell us, when we make heaven our homeland. What was central moves to the edges, while something that was only a name becomes the place from which we measure every distance.