Trivial Pursuits
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
For most of my life, I have worked too hard, too long, and too much. I never got much into games. The more the pity. Since retirement, however, I have made it my business to set aside an hour or so after supper almost every single day to spend with Mary Louise, my wonderful wife of 56 years, for playing a rousing game of Scrabble. She enjoys it and so do I. It would be easy for me to feel guilty about this indulgence, to think that it is a foolishness that ought not to be embraced seeing that there is so much stuff that ought to be read, so much stuff that ought to be studied, so much stuff that ought to be cleared off my desk, and so much stuff that ought to be done in the house, around the house, in the garage, and to the yard. I keep playing Scrabble with Mary Louise, though, for I did not give her anywhere near as much time as I ought to have done for the first 40 or 50 years of our married life, and because I have finally found out that too much work and not enough play, as the old saying might be revised to go, "makes Jack a dull old dodder."
At the risk of offering irrefutable proof that I need to be put away in some institutional environment where I will do no harm to others or to myself, let me share with you some of the trivial pursuits that are now pleasuring me and may possibly be enriching my life. I can now take a little satisfaction in relishing things heretofore denied, put off, glossed over, rushed through, or callously rejected. (Apologies are no doubt in order to the inventors, manufacturers, and promoters of the neat game of Trivial Pursuit which our children used to play when they were much younger and still at home.)
Some of my more trivial pursuits come to mind.
- Staring at the fire. It doesn`t even have to be very cold to relish this trivial pleasure. When you sit up close in front of the fireplace and look at the fire, glassy-eyed and with your mind in neutral, you are vaguely aware that the fire is always changing, unfailingly beautiful, and somehow deeply satisfying. Moreover, it is dependably and happily finite for a wood fire is soon spent. And in retirement and old age, soon comes quickly.
- Dozing in front of the television. This is light years ahead of watching it.
- Dawdling over a freezer of fresh homemade peach ice cream. Scientific thoroughness must be assigned to the task of cleaning the dasher to make sure that no melting glob of the precious substance is allowed to be wasted. Then when your bowl is filled and then refilled, the corpus of this glorious concoction is to be mincingly and meticulously savored in the realization that probably no king of England ever could even have aspired to anything quite as exquisite. Trivial? Maybe. But still deserving of a ten-gun salute.
- Listening to a roomful of uninhibited grandchildren. By my best estimate, I can hear only about one tenth of what they are saying, although heaven knows that it is not a problem caused by inadequate volume on their part. I am content to catch no more than a tithe of what is being said for I reckon that I have already heard most of what they are chattering about. And to tell the truth, I don`t really give a fig about all the trivia. It is the overall experience that I like. Rattle on.
- Watching nighthawks feeding on a summer evening. They are catching mosquitoes and high-flying insects over the brightly-lighted ballpark behind our house. The nighthawk is a marvelous creature. Some Europeans call these birds goat-suckers. (I`ll tell you why some day when you have a little time.) My Daddy called them bullbats. They are astonishingly ugly, incredibly agile, and notoriously secretive. But in the summer night sky brilliantly lighted for the night ball games, scores of them present a fascinating spectacle with their soaring, turning, diving, and circling. Akin to the equally elusive whippoorwill (officially "nocturnal nightjars") these critters may be trivial, but I find them terrific.
- Watching the lightning play at night in a distant thunderstorm. This common occurrence has been impressively presented by Mother Nature since time immemorial. I like the infinitely variable lightning streaks but my favorite part of the show is the sheet lightning that momentarily makes a brilliant spectacle of a towering thunderhead. This sight may be commonplace, even trivial, but I allow that it offers more variety and originality than television sitcoms.
- Looking at the river. In more than 50 years of watching the little mountain stream on the banks of which I built a cabin in 1958, I have never seen the Red River flag or fade. It is always changing but always the same, always in a hurry yet always running at the same speed in obedience to the call of gravity that draws it down the mountain to the same old sea. Trivial but always fascinating.
- Doing things with numbers. I have no idea why numbers are endlessly appealing to some of us; but certain people seem to get absolutely ecstatic when they see an automobile odometer present such a wonderful sight as 77,777.7 or 99,999.9 or 123, 456.7. In my case it calls for stopping the car and relishing the magic of the moment. I remember reading an article more than ten years ago in The New Yorker called "The Mountains of Pi" which told about two brothers named Chudnovsky who came to America from Kiev in Russia. These brilliant Russian Jews, Ph.D.s in mathematics, devoted their lives to what most people would consider the trivial pursuit of trying to fathom the apparently fathomless dimensions of Pi. As we may remember, Pi denotes the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The ratio itself has a numerical value of 3.14. Those who are not mathematicians can be quite satisfied, thank you, with that number; but number theorists like the Chudnovskys happily spend their lives in pushing out the numbers not just past 3.14 to 3.14159265 but then on to the hundreds, then thousands, then millions, and then billions as they look for some pattern in this transcendental number which cannot be expressed by either arithmetic or algebra. Numbers addicts around the world, however, seem never to tire of searching with the most powerful computers on earth for the exact answer to what still seems, after thousands of years, to be an insoluble puzzle. Though I am an absolute novice in this field, I am myself intrigued by this search for exactitude, no matter how trivial the pursuit may seem to be.
These are all little things, trivial things, to be sure. Yet,
Little drops of water,
Little grains if sand
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.
When you put together such little experiences, such trivial pursuits, you get a collage of memories and tap into a vast treasure trove of some of the best things in life. So . . .
Long live trivial pursuits. In a way, to use Brother Paul`s word to the Philippians, "lovely," and well worth thinking on.
