I have one. You probably do too—that part of your brain that may not show up on an MRI, but wow, is it ever active. Rather than help you out with, say, your taxes, your career, fixing your car or any other life hacks, those delicious details are just…there, serving no justifiable purpose whatsoever. 

I can visualize the layout of all the houses we frequented when I was growing up. It’s a fun trip down memory lane at times, but it will never solve world peace.

People are endlessly fascinating to me, so I’ll remember random details—like the unusual moniker of a girl I rode the bus with: Twinkle. She dotted her i with a star. I’ve completely lost touch with Twinkle and many others. So…why? 

All the jump rope chants from childhood are etched in my memory, from “Cinderella, dressed in ‘yella,’ went upstairs to kiss her fella” to “Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish, how many pieces do you wish?” Or “Not last night, but the night before, 24 robbers came knockin’ at my door…” Nostalgic, sure, but it pretty much stops there.

I had a decent elementary education, but the world is different now. Map skills, cursive, filmstrips (!) about volcanoes and the explorers all figured prominently into my K-6 years—but aren’t so emphasized now. (Today’s students will unfortunately never know the hilarity of the lava being slurped up into the volcano when the teacher humored us and showed the filmstrip backward!)

I remember the Dewey Decimal System from memorizing it in junior high: General Works is 000-099 and all that. But it’s so easy to find books from PPLD’s online catalog that I don’t rely on Mr. Dewey and his archaic system too often. 

Ready? O-KAY. I remember every cheer with motions from my high school days on the squad. Muscle memory is real! “What do we got? We got a lot. We got a team that’s red hot!” And, “R-O-W-D-I-E, That’s the way we spell rowdie.” (Oof—the grammar!) My cheer career ended when high school did and my artsy daughter wasn’t interested, so—not helpful.

I remember most of the menu of the first restaurant I ever worked at, Tippin’s Restaurant & Pie Pantry in Kansas City—even most of the 40+ pies as well. But—that wonderful regional chain closed, so I’ll never again savor “The Natural” veggie sandwich, Frisco burger, chicken cold plate, slice of mile-high cornbread with honey butter or salad with creamy parmesan dressing when passing through KC.

I’ve got terms like mass moment of inertia, eigenvectors and Newton’s laws of dynamics rattling around in my brain from proofreading some engineering textbooks. But I just remember the words, not what they mean—so I can’t crack an engineering equation with any efficacy.

Some people have meaningful, almost prophetic dreams. Those are worth remembering or writing down. Most of mine are just odd mishmashes I’d just as soon forget—but there they stay.

I remember the fragment of a tap dance and that a friend of a friend only fills her freezer with ice from Sonic, but that will never land me on “Jeopardy.” 

Still, I’m grateful for the haphazardly stitched-together crazy quilt of my life’s most trivial trivia.

“I am a part of all that I have met,” said Alfred Lord Tennyson. Maybe we are a part of all we know as well—the mundane, the childish, the not fully understood, the unhelpful.

Perhaps they aren’t totally useless, these stored-up nuggets of mine. They did help me write this column.