NFTV: Maps on the Wall

When the young man of letters got to be four, his interests branched out a bit. He was now interested in countries, especially country names, and flags, and maps. That year he asked Santa for a globe for Christmas. He still believed in Santa Claus. He was only four and a half. His favorite reading was the Doubleday Children’s Atlas. It had words like industrial and economic.

The spelling curse was finally fading. At last we were moving on. My husband was all for anything that didn’t involve the words, “What’s that spell.” So he went looking on the Internet for a program that involved countries and maps. He found a simple PC program called, “PC Globe,” and installed it for our son. I should point out that this was 1990 and there were no MAC or color screens. Everything was ugly green monochromatic giant square pixels.

PC Globe was a nifty little program. It did provide four entries—the flag, the anthem, a political map and a geographic map showing four levels of elevation—for 150 countries of the world. Our son spent an hour work-day on the computer, stopping only for lunch. The accordion-like sound of the national anthems playing constantly was not the most pleasant background noise. But he was happy and we were not spelling. So life was good at the Nerd Family house.

The next day was a Saturday. The Nerd child was in his room. Things were quiet for the longest time. As any mom knows that long quiet sets off an alarm. Kids are not meant to be quiet for long periods of time. I went to see what was happening. What I saw would have shaken any parent. It was scary.

On the walls were 150 country maps drawn from memory to four levels of elevation.

But that wasn’t the scary part—They were in alphabetical order!

My son, ET, was sitting on the floor still drawing maps.

I asked what he was doing.

“I’m starting over. They’re not quite right,” he said.

So ends another episode of Nerd Family on TV.

—me strauss Letting me be