TRIVIAL PURSUIT
From the pizza place, we were headed towards the Indian grocery store yesterday when my husband asked me for directions. Every Indian-American in Saratoga or Cupertino knows how to get to that store on De Anza boulevard, especially how to get there from Cicero’s Pizza — go west on Bollinger Road and make a right on De Anza Boulevard.
My voice exploded then with the heat of a 1000 concomitant eye rolls. “You’ve lived here all these years and you still need directions?”
“I don’t bother to remember these trivial things,” my husband said, cackling aloud.
He told me he had larger things to worry about. That was a problem. What was trivial for him was often critical for me. When my dishwasher is unloaded, what goes where — and how — is of consequence to me. I like things neat and nested. But when he’s done unloading our Miele, putting away all the ladles and knives where they belong, it’s as if hurricane Betsy — on PMS — has whooshed through the kitchen drawers. When I spazz out at such moments, my husband says I need to chill. We were at such a “trivial” moment yesterday while driving up De Anza Boulevard. I told him that remembering directions was more consequential, for instance, than knowing who someone’s Ph. D. advisor was. “Like why must you remember who Sriram Raghavan’s advisor was during his Ph. D. days?”
“The late Hector Garcia Molina — how can you forget that?” he reminded me. The late Hector’s many photographs of our family still graced our home but I didn’t need to remember the names of all those brilliant students he advised.
“But why would I remember that he was Sriram’s advisor?” I said to my husband. In any case, how was that factoid — even for my husband — more important than remembering the route to the Indian grocery store? I paused for a moment before posing my next question. “So you know the name of Hector’s advisor too?”
“Of course,” my husband gliding into a left turn lane. “Gio Wiederhold.”
“And who was Gio’s advisor? I bet you know that too.” The head of the domestic department of Trivial Pursuits was stumped. We, at least I, had arrived.
