The Geography of Us
“We are… about… here,” my father said, pointing to the approximate location of our beloved Garden State on the smooth surface of my brand-new globe.
“Here,” I repeated in a whisper, staring in wonder at the large, colorfully painted sphere tilted on its brass stand, too young to understand it mimicked the Earth’s axis. I studied the thin lines running up and across the globe—longitude and latitude, he called them—unable to understand what they measured or why the world needed to be divided so carefully into coordinates and names.
I could not yet comprehend how our house could somehow exist on the surface of this metal ball sitting on our kitchen table.
I remember his hands on the globe—steady, certain—pointing to places and saying their names. Teaching me. I have his hands.
It became our ritual. Some Friday nights, when I got to stay up later, he would carry the globe to the kitchen table after dinner and we would travel.
“Where to tonight?”
I would choose one of the jigsaw-edged landmasses, and he would read the names of countries aloud, rolling them around in his mouth like something to be tasted. Sometimes he told me what he knew; other times he invented stories, slipping into accents that made my mother laugh as she set down milk and cookies beside us.
There we were, in our house in Trenton, on a planet that suddenly felt enormous.
I couldn’t understand that the borders weren’t real lines, that the colors didn’t exist beyond the globe. The oceans, painted pale blue, felt infinite. The land, scattered and mysterious. Even though I couldn’t grasp the scale of it all, I knew I wanted to go.
Not where. Just… go.
My parents believed in educational gifts, and I soaked up everything they gave me—planetarium visits, the hardbound “Life’s Nature Library” books, and maps. Always maps. Road maps. Star maps. I even drew maps of fantasy worlds where my friend Deanna and I escaped in our vivid imaginations. We made passports to each of them, even though we didn’t really understand what passports were, and carried them in the plastic photo sleeves of old wallets as if they could actually take us somewhere.
One afternoon, my mother found me tucked into an impossibly small corner between a chair and a bookcase, hunched over as if I was hiding something.
“What are you doing?”
“I found this in Grandpa’s car,” I said, holding up an old, frayed road map.
She called to my grandmother, who came in from the kitchen, dish towel over her shoulder, spoon still in hand.
“This kid,” my grandmother said lovingly, smiling, “instead of learning to make cookies, she’s in the corner reading a map.” Then, glancing at my mother: “You hated school, and this one can’t learn enough.”
They bought me an atlas. Then a globe. Then a model universe I painted and hung in the corner of my room.
Was it destiny or chance that, while other kids played with baby dolls, I tended a flock of Barbies whose suitcases were always packed? When Mattel’s airplane—Barbie’s “Friendship”appeared under the Christmas tree, that sealed it.
Folded up, it looked like a small quonset hut with a white handle. I can still smell the sharp tang of new plastic as it opened to reveal a cross-section of a private jet: four seats at a table, a tiny galley kitchen, painted-on wardrobe racks so Barbie and her friends were always ready for anything, and a pilot with a fixed, ever-smiling face. In a detail that now feels like a kind of premonition, the exterior bore the name “United”—the airline I would one day fly most often.
That plane carried me long before I ever boarded a real one.
Sitting at the kitchen table, I watched an Oreo sink into the whiteness of the milk.
“Dad, can I go to Swizzerlind?” I asked, sounding it out.
“Switzerland,” he corrected gently. “And of course you can.”
“What about A-ustrail-i-uh?”
“Australia,” he said, smiling. “And yes. But that’s a long, long way from here.”
How long? I couldn’t imagine it then. I only remember his hands on the globe—and mine, smaller, reaching for places I couldn’t yet pronounce.
Did that moment decide everything?
My parents loved to travel, especially to islands, and sometimes they took me along. I remember the hum of the airport, the bright red American Tourister luggage, the quiet thrill of stepping into the unknown. When we went to Disney World, my favorite attraction was “It’s a Small World,” because suddenly the globe came alive—countries I had only traced with my fingers turning into music, motion, and faces drifting past in endless color and song.
But my father’s journeys were cut short by MS, an illness that slowly reshaped the geography of his life. Back then, he didn’t have the wealth of treatments and medications available today. Travel, once effortless, became complicated, then rare, and eventually something he experienced more through memory and imagination than motion. Flights were no longer simple decisions. Airports became difficult to navigate. Distance began to mean effort in ways it hadn’t before. What had once been spontaneous became something carefully weighed, and often set aside.
Still, he never let go of travel in the way he thought about it. He carried it differently then—through stories, through documentaries, through me. When I returned from places he could no longer easily reach, he listened with a kind of focus that made even small details feel important: the sound of a train station, the color of the water, the way a city felt at night. He asked questions not out of longing alone, but out of participation, as if he could still assemble the world piece by piece through what I brought back.
“Go anytime you can,” he would say. Always. “Don’t delay.”
I didn’t understand then that he was both encouraging me forward and letting something go.
Now I know.
Years later, I sit in a window seat somewhere over the Atlantic, the cabin dim and quiet. Below me, nothing but darkness—an ocean I once traced in blue on a globe, now stretching endlessly beneath the plane. I lift my hand to the window without thinking.
It’s his hand. Or mine. Or both.
Every journey I take carries a piece of him—places he dreamed of but never reached, sunsets he never saw, streets he never walked. Almost 70 countries on that old tin globe. I am living adventures for him, even as I live my own.
“I’m taking you with me, Dad,” I whisper.
And I still do.
Every time I press my hand to the window, we’re there.
Danielle Barber
Author’s Note: This blog supports a memoir-in-progress. The essays published here stand on their own and do not represent the full narrative, which continues to unfold.
