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131 JANE ARMSTRONG Ihave these world globes on top of my bookcase. I started collecting them years ago, when I bought a wobbly tin cast-off in a yard sale. The dented sphere reminded me of a game I played when I was a little girl. I had a similar globe—a cheap educational model. I’d spin the globe hard, close my eyes, and stop it with my index finger. Wherever my finger pointed would be the homeland of my one true love. I conjured romantic dreamboys from faraway places with exotic names I couldn’t pronounce. My grown-up romance with globes is purely decorative, each chosen for its size, stand design, or geographical color scheme. On one, a turquoise Tasman Sea laps at a Pepto-pink New Zealand. On another, the parchment beige Atlantic buffets the tangerine divots of the Falklands. Lately, I’ve been taking the globes down from the shelf, to study the shifting political topography of the world. I begin with America, trace the United States from New York, over to Pennsylvania, then down to Washington D.C., incredulous that wounds deep enough to justify wars don’t register on the smooth landscape beneath my hand. I move across the continent, eventually inch my way along the Himalayas, cross the tip of India into Pakistan and stop at the fine red line that separates it from Afghanistan. I wonder if each cartographer, in arrogance or in optimism, thought that his depiction of the world would be the last. I turn one globe slowly, run my hands from pole to pole, touching all coordinates from east to west. I try to picture how the surface will be drawn years from now. What will be renamed? Whose land will be erased? I spin the globe hard, listen to it whir on its axis. I watch the blurred bands of moving color. As the rotations slow, I see stretches of blue, patches of green, flashes of light. The red lines disappear. And there, between revolutions, spins a world without borders, remote and fanciful, like a childhood dream. Spinning  CH029.qxd 7/15/09 7:50 AM Page 131 ...

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