Destiny Rides a Bicycle

My favorite thing about Wikipedia is the list of nations ranked by per capita GDP (Purchasing Power Parity). My second favorite thing about Wikipedia is the access it grants me to sub-world-historical biographies, the two-minute introductions it offers to people who might not rate a Britannica entry or leave a work of art behind, but illuminate dark patches on the canvas of being alive by their choices. There are billions of ways to navigate from birth to death, and tens of thousands of those ways, at least, are profoundly awesome. George Whitman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_whitman) is a profoundly awesome way to be alive. The proprietor of the Haunted Bookstore near my house was larking around Paris one day many years ago, fresh from a stint restoring art in Florence, trying to decide what to do with her life, when a man carrying a sack of nails over his shoulder sliced a narrow turn on his bicycle and nearly clobbered her in the face. We should all be so lucky. This was George Whitman on the bike. A few weeks later she returned to the U.S. buzzing with a conviction that Whitman had helped her come to: Just because you can't stay in Oz doesn't mean you have to settle for Kansas. So she opened the best used book shop in Iowa City.