Secret Cartographies: Persia, Sri Lanka, Great Britain, and Rhode Island.

The old Persian name for Sri Lanka was Serendip. The name first met the English language in the form of a children's story, and the place became a word through the attentions of Horace Walpole. When I was young, I was told that it was the West that found Sri Lanka and called it Serendipity. They'd been looking for India, for spices and tea and exoticisms, and found this other place, instead.

Sri Lanka is not actually closer to Europe than India, of course, so I'd always been left to wonder exactly why these men in boats felt so lucky to have stumbled upon it, or, alternately, why Serendip, an island that had been charted by the outside world in the time of the ancients, would have developed the reputation for being a place in which one could stumble into luck. It has less, apparently, to do with our finding Sri Lanka than what clever Sri Lankans, and clever children, can manage to find.

Here's another: the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, when he died, was buried on his family's farm under an apple tree. In recent memory, the government of the state of Rhode Island decided that their founder deserved some sort of monument. The old maps were lined up with the new maps, and they found that his grave was in someone's back yard, which was far more convenient than its being under someone's house. As it happened, the apple tree was still there, ancient and thick. They began the exhumation in order to move the dirt that was once his body to some more prestigious spot.

Through the use of their science, they knew they were in the correct place, and they noted that the roots of the apple tree had grown through the place where the coffin once would have been. No matter; they'd dig around it. But the root had a form to it. It had an arm, in fact, and fingers. There was a torso, and legs, and even toes. The tree, finding the tasty dead thing, had eaten it, inch by inch, starting at the shoulder. Using their science once again, they found that the capillaries of the tree had borrowed the body's arteries, tracing a strange organic map.

I've always been terrifically jealous, of the tree, and the corpse, and those who found it. Alas, it seems that the root, cut away from its tree and exposed to the air for display, began to decay quickly. One can still tease out the shape, but it lacks the same majesty as finding a headless underground man made of wood.

If you require more tales of strange things that happen to the dead, I recommend After the Funeral, the funny little out of print, extremely cheap book from which my second story was stolen entirely. If you require more cartographies, sometimes secrets, always bizarre, I might recommend the often thoroughly delightful blogue, Strange Maps. If you want to increase the likelihood that you, too, will be eaten by a tree, I suggest that you look into the growing green burial movement.

Lies We Tell to Children: The Fairytale Chronicles

There are many things you can tell children that will completely alter the course of their lives and warp their perceptions of the world: there is a fat, jolly man who brings you gifts once a year, that on the day some guy died for your sins a large bunny will bring you candy, and that all dogs go to heaven. All of these things are a societally approved, mutual goal of most adults to preserve a child's innocence and to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. I mean, most parents don't feel that Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ is a suitable alternative to the myth of the easter bunny. "Now little Timmy, I know that your teacher says that Easter is about candy eggs and oversize rodents, but this movie will show you the true meaning of the holiday"(for those of you that haven't seen the movie, the true message of Easter seems to be Mel Gibson making money off of other people's religious fervor).

But a conversation with some friends sparked the interesting debate of how much illusion is too much, when do we start doing children a disservice with our lies? I have never felt particularly betrayed by the things my parents told me that didn't end up being true, but i know people who do. It seems that if your parents lied about "little things" like Santa Clause, then they could have been hiding the truth about other things too, like perhaps they don't love you. It might just be possible they have been caring for you, feeding you, and clothing you out of some sick desire to make you believe lies and watch with some perverted fascination when you discover that they were in fact the ones that bought you all those cool new toys. The ever feared revelation that one is adopted did not carry weight in my house, for some reason kids that know they are adopted don't find it so horrifying.

For me, I feel the worst lies to tell to kids are the ones that society ingrains in us, that give us false expectations for life. Things like the idea that the first person you fall in love with is going to be the person you marry, or that all of your problems can be solved in half hour to hour long time slots, and there will even be time for commercial breaks! However, I feel the worst lie we tell to children, both male and female, is the lie of Happily Ever After.

It is something that pervades everything in our entertainment industry. Books, movies, TV, they all perpetuate this idea that one day we will reach a magical point in our lives where we will have no more problems, and everything else we ever do will be easy.

Most adults, whether down to earth or of the more whimsical variety, all look at the idea of Happily Ever After and scoff. No sane grown up would really believe in something like that. But then we all think, "if I just had a better job, everything would be great. If I just had a bigger house, then I would be happy. Once I get through this hard time, there will be no more problems." The fact is, there will always be problems, there will always be one more thing to own, always one more hurtle before everything is perfect. Its capitalism, plain and simple, we are raised to always want more.

Now you are probably thinking "Cathleen, this is depressing!" and on some level you would be right. It is depressing to think that there will always be something keeping you from reaching that perfect moment from whence forth you will never be troubled. But it is also reassuring in some ways. I mean, have you ever thought about how boring Happily Ever After would be? Think about it, there would be nothing left to work towards, no more challenges, nothing to look forward to. And if you are always looking to the future to find Happily Ever After, you might forget to enjoy the present.

Do you hear me? Go out and live people! Don't sit around waiting for the time to be right, or for everything to be perfect, those things will never happen, so don't let great opportunities pass you by. So do something crazy, go skydiving, ask out that person you have a crush on, dance in the fucking rain!

Life is too short to wait for a Happily Ever After that will probably never happen, so disregard what the fairytales say and live.