Posted Oct 28, 2003

Last week I returned from a vacation spent visiting my friend Patrick, whose cleaning ladies gave me an inferiority complex. In cleaning up the living room, I gave our German map of the world a long, hard look.

It had brightened up the room when we first got it, but since then years have passed. Guests to be charmed by it have become fewer. The Soviet Union broke up and other names changed. The hanger gathered cobwebs, since I'm living proof of half the Old World warning Jim's father passed on from his father, too late to influence Jim's choice of a life partner - "Don't marry an English girl. She won't clean and she won't cook!" Worse, the foamcore warped and one corner of the map began to peel away from it.

Out on the street it went. While doing the dishes, it occurred to me that I ought to photograph it and write its epitaph. When I finished my morning chores, I told myself, but by the time I took a load of laundry down to the basement and looked back out the window, it was gone.

Glad that it had found a reprieve from the trashmen, I set about commemorating its arrival.

Once we got to know our German friend Joachim, he complained that in America we didn't have real money, real beer, or real maps.

"What's wrong with our maps?" I asked him.

"They show America in the center of the world, when it should be Europe!"

"Oh," I said. It made sense that a European map would put Europe in the middle, but it was hard for me to envision, so when he went home over one school break, I asked him to bring us back a real map.

He returned from Vacation, delighted to have been buying real beer with real money, bearing the requisite map.

I promptly took it down to the frame shop and had it mounted, and then Jim and I hung it from the picture molding in the living room.

I stepped back, eager to get the effect of a German map - and saw that Africa was in the center of it!

Since I didn't get my map photographed, here's a handy dandy graphic of a "real map"

By Ruby Jung, even the background. All rights reserved to the story. Map graphic Copyright © 2002 www. globalstar.com. All rights reserved. If you care for the background, you're welcome to copy and use it.