His memory was remarkable. Those who knew him said even that it was a marvel. Just for kicks they’d put him to the test to stunning results. If only, however, he was capable of remembering anything of significance.
It started in grade school. One Monday morning during the fall he and his pals were lined up in the playground after recess awaiting their orderly return to the classroom. There was conversation regarding Sunday’s football games from the day before. A question arose as to who had won a game between two teams. He advised of the winner, followed by a subsequent query as to his certainty, to which he confirmed by reciting the final score.
“How do you remember that game,” it was posed.
“What do you mean,” he responded with a scrunched forehead indicating befuddlement.
“Do you know the other scores, too,” continued the questioning.
“Yes, why, you don’t,” thinking it odd that his pal did not remember the scores. He then rattled off the final scores of all 14 games from the day before. His classmates looked at each other, back at him, then the ringleader said, “You’re weird.”
Weird, he pondered. Conversely, he thought his classmate was weird for having not remembered the scores, such an easy task. Then he thought, maybe it’s true, am I the oddball? And so it started, a budding awareness of an acknowledged idiosyncrasy.
Being weird became an accepted fact at his young age and with that exchange, elucidation attained. His remembrance excelled when it came to sports. Could it also possibly extend to other areas of interest or usefulness? Sadly, as it turned out, mostly no.
He eventually came to understand he had no better proficiency for remembering useful facts than most people. He had difficulty even as a grade school student accomplishing the common task of memorizing Abe Lincoln’s concise Gettysburg Address. The quadratic formula and most other numeric formulas also eluded his facile recall, requiring instead study and practice. However, what color shirt you were wearing last summer when you went for a hike? He’d remember. The name of your aunt mentioned in passing from an anecdote five years ago? He still knows. The name of the two people he just met at a business meeting? He couldn’t remember their names, usually, but he’d be able to recall the color of their ties, blouse, whether or not the person wore glasses, or on what side of head lays their part.
His girlfriend was often to chide him because ‘You never listen’ or ‘I told you.’ It was never well received when he responded, “Sorry, monkey, I remember you saying it, but it wasn’t insignificant enough for me to remember.” ‘Monkey’ he called her because he liked this one. Regardless, the veracity of his remark pertaining to the lack of insignificance was of no consolation.
When he needed a mood boost he’d sit in the dark and watch Slumdog Millionaire. The movie involved a child whose head was filled with random facts culminating in a big payout. Those who knew him well thought it odd his finding a spirit boost in this film.
Trivia-related television game shows where one could win money he deemed low-grade arousing his considerable ire. The game show format, it was later deduced, denigrated the talent of which he boasted, while the trivia game show portrayed in the Slumdogfilm he somehow deemed uplifting. It’s as if one was classic literature, the movie, while the other, TV game shows, were the intellectual equivalent of graphic novels. “The difference matters, he knew the answers from his lived experience,” he said of the boy in Slumdog, “it wasn’t the enervating mendacity of book work.”
The justification made sense to him adamantly insisting there was no incongruity to his logic. After all, on numerous occasions he boisterously vocalized his distaste for game shows based in trivia. He equated inconsequential trivia to if Mozart had wasted his wonderful musical talent relegating himself to the playing of show tunes or writing advertisement jingles. This, of course, made for a ridiculous analogy given the nonsense bumping around inside his own head. There is, of course, a complete lack of intersection between the quality of his skill compared to Mozart and that ilk.
His memory was infallible, yet easily fallible, pending the array of content. He couldn’t remember Uncle Bob’s birthday. But he could not forget that it coincided with the date years ago when the family cat never came home and is surmised to have succumbed to the local coyotes. In this way he never forgot Uncle Bob’s birthday despite his inability to remember without first taking the roundabout course to completion.
While his sporting recall did excel, it was often subjected to similar circuitous routes. He could not remember the years a football team emerged victorious with a Super Bowl championship. He could, however, remember where he watched every Super Bowl dating back to when he was nine years old. Thinking of each game in this way, where he viewed the contest, he could induce himself to know the year in which the team in question won the thing.
“When did the Bears beat the Bills because of that missed field goal attempt as the clock ran out,” he’d be asked.
“I was watching that game upstairs at my parents’ house on the little TV while visiting from college, so, January 1991. It was Scott Norwood, the Bills’ kicker, he went wide right as the game clock expired,” he’d correctly respond.
Whenever friends or acquaintances squabbled about details, he’d be called in as the tiebreaker. It was not uncommon for him to get infused into a three-way phone call, “Hi, it’s me and Jim’s on the line with us. Remember when we saw that movie in Old Town Pasadena the afternoon of your birthday 15 or so years ago? What was the name of that restaurant we ate at,” the question might be posed.
“It wasn’t a restaurant, it was a bar on Colorado Blvd., The Dirty Diver we called it. And it wasn’t dinner, really. We had jalapeno nachos that you said were disgusting, so you ordered the big pub pretzel and dipped into the rancid dipping sauce, which we told you not to eat. You later got sick at my apartment. Jim, of course, wasn’t hungry and ate from the well-handled and grimy community bowl of peanuts all evening from on the bar.”
Having gotten along in years, virtually every one of his friends and extended family were aware of his annoying talent. They dutifully did their best to maneuver with a wide berth in casual conversation seeking to avoid another unsolicited memory episode. He eventually came to accept and embrace his esoteric prowess of nonsensical recall. Like so much lint in his coat pocket was his life’s worth of trivia accumulation.
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