Columbus Day

The second Monday of October is Columbus Day. Other than workers who get the day off the only people who pay attention to Columbus Day are those waiting for a check or package in the mail to arrive and realizing they are not getting it because there is no mail.

Here is the untold story of Columbus Day.

Columbus Day is the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's landing. Some scholars dispute that Columbus discovered America. One group believes seafaring Phoenicians found it. Other educators say that before Columbus got there, ancient mariners from Yugoslavia came over on paddle boats, peddling them with their feet. Another school of nautical experts insists Scandinavian Vikings arrived first to raid, plunder, and later get a football team named after them.

Ancient history professor and conspiracy theorist Reginald Wellerton from South Amherst Junction Online University, questioned, “If Columbus discovered America, why isn’t it called, The United States of Columbus?”

“If Amerigo Vespucci found it, why isn’t it called the United States of Amerigo?” A reporter asked him.

“I don’t know,” Wellerton answered.

Previously, little has been written about why Christopher Columbus sought to leave Italy and find a new land. What happened was shortly before his voyage, Chris attended the Rome City Lambrooscofest. He went by the street name C-Man back then and was on a date with Sophia Stefareeno, a handsome woman who historians say had an aroma about her that reminded one of grated Gorgonzola Cheese. With limited bathing facilities back then, it was common for people to smell like assorted cheeses.

“Let’s go on the miniature donkey ride,” Sophia said to Christopher.

The two had been dating since they met at an oldies dance in the hall of the Bella’s Bocce Ball alley. In the era of Columbus, an oldies band was from the fourteen-fifties. Chris agreed to go on the ride, even though he feared donkeys. He had nightmares that featured a big-toothed donkey coming into his bedroom and making loud hee-haw sounds, but to please his date, he went on the ride.

Over the years, every male has done things like this for their woman. Back in prehistoric days, a male might want to spend a Saturday afternoon playing five-stone kaboola with his Neanderthal buddies, but his mate insisted he visit her friend Shabooboo’s cave and see how she and her common-law mate redecorated the cooking stone room.

“You come, Grog. Ug.” she barked.

Grog grunted a yes reply, held his hands by the fire, and said, “Fire warm.”

Similar things happen in modern times.

“You are not going to spend all Sunday sitting on your recliner and watching football, Benjamin. There is an estate sale on County Line Road, and my friend Cassidy says they will have a lot of knick-knacks.”

Benjamin grunted a yes reply, shut off his forty-eight-inch flat screen television, and said, “Football good.”

The donkey ride was going smoothly until the popping of a jellyfish balloon startled Christopher’s burro. The animal began running in a circle at a breakneck speed. Never a good rider, Chris could not slow it down. As it continued to race around the small-circled ring, he became dizzy, tumbled off, and fell to the ground.

The spinning upset his stomach, and he walked off by himself, not wanting to add to his embarrassment by being sick in front of his friends. Trying to ignore the loud laughter behind him, Chris walked through the fair, looking for a glass of boiled squid legs with a bay leaf to soothe his uneasy stomach. Alka Seltzer or Pepto Bismol had not yet been invented, and a glass of boiled squid legs with a bay leaf was what people in ancient Rome drank for upset stomachs.

Still lightheaded during his search for a stomach-soothing remedy, he accidentally entered the tent of Madam Ostelinda Loveridge, a fortune-teller. Chris thought her canopy was the convenience store tent.

Seeing his pale, white face, Madam Ostelinda Loveridge gave him a wet sponge to hold on his forehead. In those days, actual live sponges that Italian fishermen caught in the ocean were used. Madam Ostelinda Loveridge told Chris to sit and charged him nine denarii to read his fortune.

“I look at you and see water,” the fortune-teller voiced with a husky Transylvanian accent as she held a crystal ball.

She meant the water dripping from the sponge onto Christopher’s face, but he took it to mean that he should get a boat, sail, and find a new world.

His decision to leave and cruise the seven seas was made easier when the next day, gossip columnist Rona Barreta got word of the incident and wrote in her “About the Città” column, which appeared on page two of the Rome Enquirer.

“This reporter has heard through the grapevine that a certain male, whose initials are CC and goes by the street name C-Man, was on a date with a woman who smells like Gorgonzola Cheese. Well, Mister CC fell off a donkey, and it was very entertaining to all attendees at the carnival.”

Although Christopher had not been mentioned by his proper name, just about everyone in Italy knew the column was about him. None of his acquaintances said anything directly to his face. They knew he studied judo at Mister Yamamoto’s Judo and Gladiator school, but Chris knew they were talking about him when he approached, and everyone hushed up.

The final straw was when he walked by Luigi’s Pepperoni and Olive Store. Luigi’s plump wife Doris was outside sweeping with her Pietro Popeela’s Miracle Broom. When seeing Christopher, she put the broom between her legs, pretended to be riding it, then waved her arms up and down in the air like a chicken trying to fly, and began to make braying donkey noises.

“Du bist der esel der vom esel gefallen ist,” she said and burst out laughing.

Chris wasn’t sure what she was saying. Doris had moved from Bohemia and still only spoke German, but he thought it might be, “You are the donkey who fell off the donkey.”

Instead of staying around town and being troubled about the incident, Christopher Columbus sought to find a new land where no one heard of the donkey mishap. First, he asked the Queen of Italy for money to buy a boat. She said no, so Christopher went to Queen Isabella of Spain. “I am out to find a new land,” he told her.

A popular Queen, she was affectionately called “Queen Izzy,” by her subjects. “Do you know how to drive a boat?” Queen Izzy thought Chris did not look like the ship captains she had seen in paintings. They always wore a patch over one eye, sported an oversized hoop earring, had a beard, used a wooden leg, drank from bottles of rum, and resembled Errol Flynn.

“Yes, I know how to drive a boat.” The question annoyed him, but he tried not to show it. He had been a singing gondola driver since he was sixteen and the cruise director on the SS Santa Palooza for two years.

“Well, okay then, young man. As long as you can skipper a boat, here is a check for five million escudos. I hope you do not mind the traveler’s checks. Now go find a new world, and, while you are there - if they have Walmarts, pick me up a George Foreman grill for the palace.”

Chris used some money to stock up with food for the trip. He bought bags of dry spaghetti at the Everything Is a Denarii Store. Tomato sauce was purchased. He wanted to freeze his mother’s homemade sauce and bring it, but freezers had not yet been invented, and if they were, the boats had no electrical outlets to plug them in. He thought of bringing sausages but did not feel like shopping at Luigi’s Pepperoni and Olive Store, fearing Doris would again make fun of him.

They sailed for days, weeks, years. The boat endured all types of terrible weather. One night there was hail the size of soccer balls. Winds were so strong a sailor’s toupee blew off and flew into the swelling waves. Luckily, the man brought a spare. Near Antarctica, it was so cold sailors had to carry the boat over an iceberg. The crew was getting edgy.

Fights broke out on the decks over shuffleboard games. Sailors wanted to stop in a port town, walk around the city’s main streets wearing their uniform, and ogle women. A group of boatmen who started singing, “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” when they left the shores of Europe, were now up to eight-hundred-sixty-two million bottles of beer.

The Parmesan Cheese for the spaghetti ran out. Even Chris was worried. He did not like spaghetti without cheese, but he kept his cool and kept the men calm.

“He is such a leader,” said Guido Marinara, a young Ensign, who later would invent Mozzarella Marinara. “Someday, they will name the capital of Ohio after him.”

They sailed on, found America and Plymouth Rock, and the rest is history.

The End