Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
geekdom kids into computer science majors. For the first time in decades, there is reason
to think that we might be entering a geographic renaissance. Viva la revolución.
IfthegeographersandpsychologistsI'vetalkedtoarerightandmaploveisjustasymp-
tomofagiftforspatialthinking,itmakessensethatmapscouldbepassedthroughfamilies
genetically, like curly hair or color blindness. That's certainly true in my case; my parents
liked looking at maps. So did my grandparents, my mom's parents. The second atlas I ever
owned as a kid, after the Hammond atlas I saved up all year for, was a Rand McNally
Cosmopolitan World Atlas that my grandma mailed to me in Korea. I can still picture the
ballpoint-pen inscription on the title page, in her neat, round handwriting: “Merry Christ-
mas1983!Atlasesaresomeofourfavoritethingstoo!Love,GrandmaandGrandpa.”That
meant a lot to me at that age, the idea that someone besides me understood —that atlases
were, in fact, an acceptable thing for adults to say they liked.
Grandma died of a lung ailment almost ten years ago, shortly after Mindy and I were
married. She never got to meet her great-grandkids, and, I realize now, I never got to talk
maps with her as a grown-up. My grandpa is still doing as well as one could hope to at
eighty-two,andsincehelivesnearby,wehavehimoverfordinnereveryWednesdaynight.
It's not hard to get him to talk about his late wife, whom he clearly still misses very much.
“Why did Grandma always love maps and atlases?” I ask him one night as we clear the
table after dinner.
“Well, her mother married a man called Elcock.” (From many past conversations with
my grandpa, I'm not surprised that this story seems to (a) begin decades before I thought it
did and (b) involve people I've never met.) “He was a bounder. A drunk. Betty remembers
gettingsentouttothebarstotrytogethimtocomehome.”Hestillreferstohiswifeinthe
present tense; he also sometimes slips and calls her “your mother,” a habit he must have
fallen into while raising his three daughters.
“Betty's mother divorced this man Elcock, then remarried him, then divorced him. After
the divorce, her mother had to start working full-time. They moved a lot. One time when
we were in Salt Lake City, we drove around all afternoon looking at all the places where
she'dlived.Irememberfour,five,sixofthem.Duringthesummer,sheandTeddy”—that's
Grandma's younger sister, my great-aunt—“were sent to live with relatives because her
mother was working such long hours. They'd sit in the public library all day, and your
motherwouldlookatatlases.”Thatwaswhereitallstarted,then:aturbulenthomelifeand
a welcoming library with pages and pages of beautiful maps. Werner Muensterberger, who
wrote about antique maps in his topic Collecting: An Unruly Passion, has noticed that map
lovers often seem to come from broken homes (like Grandma's) or families that moved
around a lot (like mine). Maps give us a sense of place and stability and origin that we oth-
erwise lack.
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