My husband snorted a laugh as he looked up from his work. "OK....Poppy!"
So I come by it naturally, what can I say? Dad loved to read maps (hey, at least it's not as dull as reading the phone book---although he did like to scrutinize the Bledsoe County phone book whenever he could get his hands on one!) Geography interests me as well. He had a very keen sense of direction, despite some of his infamous "short-cuts." (Which is why it was so alarming at the beginning stages of his illness when Dad got lost driving to church and looked up from the newspaper one day to ask "Where's Gordonville?"--a town only a few miles from his house) On more than one occasion, a brand-new, up-to-date, Rand McNally Road Atlas was among the brightly-wrapped packages on Christmas morning or among birthday gifts, regardless of his retorts of "I'm not opening any gifts this year."
Dad and I had a box of the 50 different United States flashcards. Designed to help school children learn the geographic location of each state (the featured state was highlighted in red while the rest of the map was tinted blue), Dad and I would make a game out of this resource. No words on the front, but of course, on the back of each card, the state's vital information was listed--name, capital, "nickname" (i.e. Pennsylvania is the Keystone State), population, etc. So we'd put them into a pile face-up and shout out the state's name as soon as new card was revealed. Correct answers allowed the winner to take possession of the card and the player with the most cards at the end won. Naturally, Dad cheated (sometimes instead of counting our cards at the end of the game, Dad would suggest we just compare piles. He would stack his cards with spaces in between so it appeared his pile was bigger than it actually was)--we'd have to call in Mom as the judge--to which Dad would laugh uproariously! (We had a box of U.S. Presidents flashcards, too, and these "flashcard games" aren't the only card games where Dad cheated!! I have fond memories of playing SNAP in the living room, with me perched on a little chair, the piano bench doubling as our "game table" positioned between my seat and Dad's recliner. And it wouldn't be a complete, authentic game of SNAP unless Dad cheated!!)
I'm anxious for my children to learn about other places in the world---I am always thrilled to see them trying to find some distant location on the map. It helps, too, that this week is Missions Conference at our church. It's exciting to hear firsthand about how God is at work around the world. We did break out those old "State" flashcards last year as we were preparing to embark on our cross-country family road trip, hoping to instill in them some sense of locale/ distance/ geography, but there's nothing quite like experiencing it in person. That was one thing I thought about a lot as we traveled, not being able to tell Dad, "Hey, you know route 80? We drove it all the way across Wyoming today Dad!" I can guarantee Dad would have had out good ol' Rand McNally, following right along with our itinerary! How do I know? Because he did that very thing when my brother took his family on their own cross-country tour more than 10 years ago (Something like 44 nights in a pop-up camper!! Oy!!). That was at the beginning of the cell-phone age and Dad thought it was the neatest thing to hang up the phone after a conversation with his son to report to us, "They were sitting by the campground's pool in Reno, Nevada.... (or wherever they might have been)....drove 600 miles today...." or "Wonder where they are now, they should be in Kansas by now." I wonder what Dad would think now if he could appreciate satellite maps!?
