Queen of the Geeks

Many years ago, the young next door neighbor was in my living room, despairing over finishing her social studies homework. To demonstrate the impossibility of the assignment, she read off a question. I answered it. She read off another. I answered that too. (Keep in mind this was a 13 year old quizzing a thirty-something history major.) After I answered the third question, Bethany looked at me with insight dawning on her face.

"April, you are the queen of the geeks!"

At about the same time, I was reading a fascinating book about American bridge builders. One afternoon, I stopped by a friend's house. Her husband, a civil engineer who was a bridge designer, was there and I started talking excitedly about this book. Jim stared at me, then said slowly "April, I work with some really geeky people and even they wouldn't read that book."

(The book, if you are wondering, was Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America by Henry Petroski. Great reading.)

Okay, so maybe I was way up there in the Kingdom of Geek.

Being geeky is not necessarily synonymous with being highly intelligent, although I like to think of myself as reasonably bright. Highly intelligent is being great at calculus. (I was good but not great at it.) Being geeky is being enthralled with the mathematical proof through calculus of the circumference of a circle. Highly intelligent is doing really, really well on your SATs. (I did okay.) Being geeky is remembering the definition of "halcyon" from the SAT study guide 35 years later.

("Halcyon" means calm, peaceful, and tranquil for SAT purposes.)

Highly intelligent is knowing and applying the rules of evidence in a trial if you are a lawyer, as I was. (I was never confident about my grasp of the rules of evidence.) Being geeky is being able to answer a judge's question ("what's the name of Barney Google's horse?") while opposing counsel was still trying to make sense of the question.

(Barney Google's horse, incidentally, was named "Spark Plug.")

Geekiness is genetic and cannot be taught. You either are or are not a geek. I got it from my mom's family, the Skatzes. I had two uncles who were fonts of quirky, irrelevant trivia and my beloved Grandmother Skatzes had an amazing store of off the wall facts that would bubble out from time to time. Some of my cousins inherited the trait as well, especially my cousin Brent.

I'm proud to note that my older son Ben inherited the G gene, as it is known. Like his mother before him, he played on the high school In the Know team, an academic quiz team. (Unlike me, as Ben is also highly intelligent, he played varsity team all four years, compared to my one.) Geek that I was, I would attend the matches (not geeky) and sit there whispering the answers under my breath (geeky).

(An interesting but not geeky side note. In the team photo above, circa 1974, I am on the far left swapping a joke with future local lawyer Keith, a Deadhead with a high geek quota himself. My future brother-in-law Brian, not a geek except in the musical sense, anchors the far right.)

Ben ended his final match of his senior year in true geek form. His team went down in flames at the state playoff and were eliminated by noon. For me, it was a bittersweet moment, watching his last competition. We walked out to the car, quietly, then Ben said "well, we went out not with a bang, but a whimper."

T. S. Eliot in the parking lot! (The ending of "The Hollow Men.") My beamish boy!

We chortled in our joy all the way home.