Columbus Day

The rain stopped today. For the past week rain fell day and night. At times, rain fell hard enough to soak a person in seconds. At other times, the rain slowed enough to allow a person a quick walk from house to garage or from parking lot to store without too much damp inconvenience. The weather brought its own mood to my home and summoned to my mind a stanza from Fountains of Wayne’s Valley Winter Song.

“And late December
Can drag a man down
You feel it deep in your gut
Short days and afternoons spent pottering around
In a dark house with the windows painted shut”

Though it’s not late December, the thick cloud cover makes the daylight shorter than it should be for mid-October. It’s December-ish. My house is dark. Most of the windows are painted shut. And who wants to go outside when it’s cold and raining out there? I stayed inside and pottered around.

(The rainy week also brought to mind Ray Bradbury’s short story, The Long Rain, but that’s a lot more drama than I want to get into now.)

Over in Richmond, they held their annual Folk Festival on the riverfront this past weekend. Last year over 200,000 people attended. This year’s attendance was down, but over 100,000 fans showed up despite the non-stop drizzle. I was not one of them.

There is something else special about today. It’s Columbus Day. Christopher Columbus used to be a hero. Americans, especially Italian-Americans, loved Columbus. Then, Native Americans pointed out the inconvenient fact that Columbus’s discovery of the New World opened the door to brutality, enslavement, and near-annihilation for them.

Columbus is a hero to some people and a villain to some people. So parts of the country have renamed the holiday. Berkeley, California, calls it Indigenous Peoples Day; South Dakota calls it Native American Day; Alabama calls it American Indian Heritage Day; and Hawaii calls it Discovery Day.

I don’t blame Columbus for all the negative consequences of his discovery. The guy was just looking for a shortcut to the East Indies. He even thought he had found it. Hence: Indians, his name for the people he found living here. It didn’t take long for people to figure out that Columbus had not found a new way to reach the East Indies, but the name stuck. Indians.

Columbus once said, “Riches don't make a man rich, they only make him busier.” He should know, because in his lifetime he endured poverty and prosperity.