The Gift for the Friend Who Became a Godparent

My friend Ludo got the call on a Sunday morning.

His best friends, who had a baby coming in four months, wanted him to be the godfather.

He called me immediately after and he sounded like a person who had just been handed something he had not known he wanted until it was in his hands.

He said: they asked me. They want me to be the person.

I said: of course they do.

He said: I do not know what I am doing.

I said: nobody does. That is not the qualification. The qualification is that they trust you with her.

Her. The baby was going to be a girl. They had just found out. Her name was going to be Sable.

Ludo was forty-one. He had no children, had not particularly wanted any, but had always been the person children in his life gravitated toward because he was curious and funny and took them seriously without being earnest about it. He was good with children in the way that comes from actually finding them interesting rather than from performing interest.

He was perfect for this.

I thought about what to give him. Not the baby. Him.

He collected old maps, the same way Ray had in another story I once heard, small framed ones, historical ones, interesting ones. He had them in his study, a whole wall of places as they had been understood at various points in history.

I found a cartographer who made custom hand-drawn maps. I commissioned one of the neighborhood where Ludo had grown up, the one he had told me stories about for years, in the style of a seventeenth-century city map, with small illustrated landmarks and his family's street named in the margin in fine italic type.

I had the title read: The Territory of Ludo, circa now.

When he unwrapped it he laughed immediately at the title. Then he looked at it more carefully and went quiet.

He said: this is my street.

I said: you have a territory worth mapping. Sable is going to want to know it.

He said: I had not thought about that.

I said: she is going to know you your whole life. She should know where you come from.

He had it framed and it went on the wall with the others. One more place as it had been. But this one was his.