Trivia Not Trivial, To Me

Around work, sometimes we get caught up with asking each other trivia questions, just to help pass the time of day. Usually, I'm pretty quick with trivia, seeing how I have had this propensity to pick up "useless" knowledge over the years with unconscious ease. But I have to admit that these trivia games have begun to wear on me.

The reason I remember so much trivia is that it all takes place within context. Musically, I can almost visualize the times and places when and where I heard various songs. Furthermore, I make this connection even when I am just playing them in my head. Songs like Paul Simon's Loves Me Like a Rock, the Beatles' Don't Pass Me By, Harry Chapin's W-O-L-D, Chicago's I've Been Searching For So Long, and Bette Midler's Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy were all tunes going on in my mind while running in my late teens around the Nova/BCC complex in Davie, Florida. Isao Tomita's remarkable 1974 album Snowflakes Are Dancing places me at a place I worked in Miami Shores during the same period. Country and western songs tend to draw me back to my first year at the post office, when the only headset radio I had, a real "cheapie", could only pick up the powerful GC-101 country and western station. Every time I see the stylized "D" on official Detroit Tigers items, it takes me back to a baseball card I had that displayed it when I was about six. And me standing in front of my house on the north side looking at it. Young Frankenstein I first viewed on the Reitz Union lawn at the University of Florida. Find Your Place in the Sun, a 1977 hit by Pablo Cruz, was played before a movie showing in that Reitz Union's theater. I know the video games I have played over the years by when and where I played them (and with whom). And so on. If someone asks me a trivia question touching upon any of these items or a myriad of others, a chain of associations and memories ensues. And that's what I dig the most about trivia, not just getting the answers right.

I tend to cluster my memories together into settings. When I am prompted by one item, the others fall into place as well. So someone at work asking me a trivia question is begging to be bored by my very long, drawn-out response as I explore the significance that the supposedly insignificant trivia carries to me. But I am tired of simply barking out the answers to show what a smartass I am. There is more to it than that for me.

What makes trivia enjoyable to me are those associations and dug-up memories that create a picture of my own personal past. I like to listen to others relate in a personal way like this, but apparently I tend to do it much more intensely than others.