The Denver Post titled this "I Am Curious (But Not Yellow)

Sunday, March 12, 2000

My sister Laura, my daughter Kathleen and I were hiking one lovely Saturday morning, single file on the path around Rampart Reservoir outside of Woodland Park. Laura asked Kathleen something---I didn’t hear what---and she replied, "I don’t know, ask the Queen of Useless Information," and she hooked a thumb towards me, bringing up the rear. Laura and I nearly fell down laughing, because it’s a joke among my family and friends that I love to know things. Anything. Everything.

Once I was visiting my niece Penny in Corvallis, Oregon. She was driving me around, showing me her lovely town, and I asked, "What’s the population?" She said, "I don’t know." I was astounded. "But you must!" I said. She asked, "Why?" I replied that to know the population gives you a sense of how large a city is. She said she knew how large it was just by driving around.

This love of knowing things comes, I think, from my dad. He had little formal education but he read and listened, and he had an answer for every question I ever asked him, although it was often prefaced by, "I’m not sure but here’s what I think..." It shows a thoughtfulness and curiosity about the world that I find extremely appealing. And, not incidentally, it makes the person much more entertaining to be around than the incurious.

My friend Joe said his father’s answer to his questions was always, "I don’t know." Perhaps because of that, he came out of high school with a determination not to learn another thing, and it wasn’t until he was about 33 that he started being curious again. Now when his son Edison asks a question, if Joe doesn’t know the answer he says, "Let’s look it up," and Edison has a bright and lively curiosity.

It’s hard to have a conversation with people who aren’t curious. You throw out little tidbits that have piqued your interest and they just look at you, leaving you hanging out there searching for something else to say. All of my best friends have it, and conversations with them are quick and funny and interesting.

I’ve always liked discovering the little details of the world. Knowing them helps me visualize something better, it helps me put things in context, and it helps me understand references others make. It’s not just storing information for the sake of it, though. Well, maybe it is, sometimes. I’m not sure what good it will ever do me to know who were the two Caesars who ruled during the time of Christ, unless I get on "Jeopardy."

But there is also the convenience of not having to look things up, when you have a head full of trivial information. I used to be Governor Romer’s executive assistant and one early morning he called in to check on his messages. Then he asked, "What’s Larry’s number?"

"2307," I said.

"What’s Stewart’s number?"

"4567."

"What’s Ken’s number?"

"4589. Is this a test?"

"Thank you," he said, and hung up. He may not have appreciated my sense of humor, but I believe he did appreciate the speed with which I could give him the information he needed.

All is vanity, Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, and one of the dictionary definitions of vanity is "trivia." So if everything is trivia anyway, I’m on the cutting edge.

The first time I saw Carol Burnett perform on television, lo, these many years ago, she did a poem whose refrain was "‘cause I’ve seen every movie Ann Sheridan ever made," the point of which was that she won a contest because she knew the name of a movie in which Ann Sheridan played a minor role. And who knows, I may actually get on "Jeopardy" one of these days, when being the Queen of Useless Information would be of definite benefit. And I know every movie Robert Redford ever made.

# # #