It is amazing the amount of useless info that lives stored in my brain. I am a whiz at trivia games – the more arcane the better – but sometimes my brain scares even me.
I was at a horse show with my mother this weekend. We go to watch. There are lots of people I was in 4-H with who are now there because their kids are showing. I was sitting next to a person who used to be in my club. (Maturity and three kids have done wonders for her, let me tell you!) Anyway, she introduced me to some of her friends by my maiden name. A person sitting in front of me turned around and said, “I knew I recognized you!” and turned back around. Yeah, I recognized her too but absolutely could not figure out who she was.
That’s enough to make you insane. My mother and I spent the rest of the weekend racking our brains. Her kid has her husband’s last name so that didn’t help. Over the course of the weekend we got clues. Her first name, a club show she attended, but nothing was coming together. We asked other people. They agreed that she was very familiar and shared the clues that they had gleaned. She was friends in 4-H with a certain person (sadly not attending this show) and she showed Thoroughbreds.
Why didn’t we ask who she was? Because she so obviously knew us all. We all agreed that we knew her too. And after the first 24 hours it just seems rude to ask.
I left the show not being any closer to the truth. I drove 3 hours home. When I was 15 minutes from home and not thinking about this at all, my trivia-choked brain spit out the name of her horse. Mind you we are talking about a horse that this girl showed 20 years ago. Why is that in my brain? I remember that I really liked that horse and that the horse died in a barn fire. Actually the horse had been rescued from the barn and then panicked and ran back inside and died. Very sad.
I called my mother immediately and told her the horse’s name and reminded her about the fire. She remembered. Her brain spit out an image of the girl riding that horse in a class and looking back over her shoulder to check for people coming up behind her. That’s a weird image to keep in your brain. Through all this we still didn’t have her name. That’s not weird for my brain. My brain knows that horse details are more important than human details.
So then my organized packrat mother calls back about 5 minutes later with her last name. How did she get that? She’s the only person I know who can actually lay her hands on a copy of a show program from 1991. Actually she was checking 1991-1993 for confirmation of the name because these were with her new horses whose names we didn’t remember. I asked her the obvious question, “Why do you have that and why do you know where it is that fast?”
She said that she knew that she’d need it sometime. Well, very good Mom.
