It turns out Snoopy was born at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, but the man running the trivia night said he’d take Daisy Mills.
Trivia by rights should be boring. It should be as tedious as watching people recite all the numbers they know. Happening to remember where Snoopy was born or recognizing the first few bars of “A Day in the Life” is, on its own, uninteresting.
But for some reason, packing a bunch of non-vital, unimportant, uninteresting and in every sense trivial factoids like that in a faux-Irish pub with pretty decent chicken tenders is somehow a wonderful way to spend a night.
The crowd at the Celtic Crown’s trivia night after the rain stopped blattering was a subdued level of rowdy. The afternoon storms knocked out the bar’s power, which had been restored by the time trivia started, and blew out the trivia master’s sound system, which hadn’t.
Until a thin, balding man loped into the room to tinker with keys and wires, the trivia master had to yell out the questions and watch his watch for the appropriate time to allow answers, unable to rely on the length of a song to tell him when enough time had passed.
Once the music could again accompany the massive, sports-laden TVs circling the room, the bar became more bar-like. The familiar, forgettable pop jingles again filled air that, a few minutes before, held nothing but the noise of fans, questions and tables whispering over if the answer was 1982, ’83 or ’84.
I have no deep thoughts on trivia. That’s appropriate. The night should remain trivial and unimportant.
What was important was that there was a night. That as thunderstorms waned into occasional wind-blown dapples, people gathered around tables with the ones they loved, or at least liked, or at least knew sports to fill a vital gap in the team’s knowledge.
The night meant nothing. The people we chose to spend it with did.
