Please, Just Let Me Tell You This

As a child, I was an avid collector of useless facts. “Did you know the average person eats eight spiders in their lifetime while asleep?” I remember asking my mother once.

“How do you even keep track of a statistic like that?” she balked. “That has to be made up.”

Another time, she sneezed while making a turn and I blurted, “Did you know that more people die in car crashes each year from sneezing than from drinking and driving?”

“That just can’t be right. Also, you’re not helping.”

In the years since, I’ve gotten better at sourcing my facts, though not at keeping them to myself. Recently, at work, a woman asked me to find her a copy of Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon.”

“Do you know how Brown died?” I asked.

“No…” the woman said, an odd look coming over her face. “Why would anyone know that?”

“She’d just had surgery for a ruptured appendix. When the doctor asked how Brown was feeling afterwards, she proceeded to do the Can-can. She suffered an embolism while dancing.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Do you really think so? Because it’s how I’d like to go.”

Another woman a few days later requested a copy of “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silversteen and I couldn’t help asking, “Do you know what else the author wrote besides children’s books?”

“Nope,” she replied.

“He was the lyricist for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show—You know, songs like “Penicillin Penny, Freaker’s Ball, Gertrude the Groupie…”

“I’m familiar,” she cut me off, her voice stricken, as if now she didn’t want to bring the books of a deviant home to read to her kids.

I decided not to tell her about the plays he’d also written, including one where a woman tries to enjoy a bath while her husband sits on the toilet embroiled in a game of Russian Roulette. But when I pulled the book she’d wanted off the shelf and she saw its author photo of a man so sexy it would make anyone uncomfortable, still she glared at me as if I’d had something to do with this.

“Do you, maybe, have anything by Roald Dahl,” she ventured, leaving a lot of space between our bodies in the stacks, as if whatever led me to collect the things I did might be contagious.

We did, and I gathered them for her without mentioning that the author had been a notorious womanizer who’d written a number of very good adult stories—my favourite of which involved a woman killing her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and feeding the murder weapon to the police. I knew by now that she wouldn’t find my facts fun at all, though this didn’t stop me from itching to share them with her.