I am usually the first to grab my family’s copy of Life magazine. As touted on this week’s cover, the next-to-last page is a black-and-white photograph remarkable for the time, the first crisp, highly-detailed aerial view of the North Pole, or maybe the South Pole, I forget. It shows a complex, craggy and absolutely featureless mass of ice and snow. A bit off from the center, I draw a tiny barber pole.

While my brother reads the magazine that night, I watch. When he gets to that page, he studies it for a long while. He stares and stares and says half-aloud, “Hey…”. Once he realizes, he is annoyed, but laughs.