By Jim Hagarty
I am a walking encyclopedia with an amazing ability to retain and retrieve facts.
A lot of people have benefited from this skill over the years. I hope that doesn’t sound like bragging. I don’t mean it to be. It’s just a fact, identical to the endless supply I have stored in my very active brain. People at parties, especially, are grateful I am there to enrich every conversation.
I was at such a party last winter and fulfilled my usual duty. Those in attendance were attentive and impressed. After supplying several low-level tidbits to the talk, I held forth when the subject of the movie White Christmas came up, appropriately so at a Christmas gathering. We had watched the movie the night before so I was primed and ready.
“It’s ironic,” I interjected to the 10 people listening carefully, “that the Danny Kaye character predicts the Bing Crosby character (I can’t remember which one was Davis and who was Wallace) will have nine children some day because in real life, Crosby ended up having nine kids.” That is remarkable when you think about it and those who heard me speak were enthralled at this unexpected enlightenment. I was glad to enlarge their tidbits storehouses.
My niece, a geologist and student at a California university who is actively doing research on the first manned mission to Mars (seriously) pulled out her smartphone and a few seconds later announced that Bing Crosby had seven children in real life.
I was surprised that my niece and Google would be wrong about that but I didn’t object. Instead I steered the conversation to other areas about which I am very knowlegeable. We discussed various historical figures and I mentioned being at the house in England where once lived Mary Arden, the mother of George Washington. My fellow partiers’ eyes widened at that morsel.
My niece, who had lived in England for three years when she was younger, narrowed her eyes to help her read from her smartphone.
“Mary Arden was William Shakespeare’s mother,” she said.
This was sad I concluded to myself. If someone like this is working on the Mars project, they’ll probably land the damn rocket on Venus instead. Is this the quality of education California universities are supplying?
My niece disputed several more of my facts with the help of her phone which had been surgically attached to her hand by NASA scientists. I grew quiet. It is important to withdraw your encyclopedic mind in certain low-information environments.
“So what’s new?” my uncle asked me. “It’s raining out,” I said, without having to look at my hand. I was going to talk about the record mild temperatures but my niece was looking right at me. So I decided to switch from holding forth to information gathering mode.
“So when are you going back to California?” I asked her.
By the way, did you know she is flying back to the States on the space shuttle Discovery?
