FROM MADRID TO HEAVEN

About the Book

This I can say to you, Dear Reader, is a story of love and marriage beyond the wonders that make of life a grand and incomprehensible mystery. Explain if you can, how a young, innocent Catholic girl in Madrid would become the wife of a naive, Protestant American traveler stopping-over in Madrid en route to Tehran, Iran. Explain if you can, how the Bishop of Madrid would condescend to grant a special dispensation for the first mixed Protestant-Catholic wedding to be held in a Catholic Church in Franco’s Spain in 1960. These matters can only be attributed to fate, chance, or the intervention of the Divine Hand. Nevertheless, those days and that adventure were as pure and fresh and exciting as only a youthful romantic can imagine. Those days I would like to hold on to. Those days I would like to tuck away in this book so that I can say: “Look at our days, Dear Reader, days so bright and beautiful that I have kept to show to you so that you can see that we too loved life and treasured the moments that made up our days."

About the Author

William Elihu Palmer grew up near Salisbury, Maryland where he taught Spanish at Salisbury University. His wife, Angeles, is from Spain. They have four children. His interest in Columbus developed while teaching at the University of Salamanca, Spain, in 1965. Since then he has traveled to many of the places important in the life of Columbus. In 1989 he attended the National Endowment of the Humanities Institute at UCLA on "The Intellectual World of Christopher Columbus". During the celebration of the Quincentenary of the discovery of the New World in 1992 he performed a one-man show called "Columbus Rediscovered." This book "The Lost Journal of Christopher Columbus" probes the intimate thoughts and deep motives of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.