I'LL TAKE USELESS INFORMATION FOR $800 ALEX

I'LL TAKE USELESS INFORMATION FOR $800 ALEX

I was going to see a friend. When I got there, the front door was open so I knocked and entered. I saw them — Ray, my friend, hunched over the kitchen table, his granddaughter Amy beside him, both of them staring down at a stack of papers with the hollow expressions of people who had recently lost an argument with customer service.

“Kenny!” Ray looked up with the kind of relief usually reserved for first responders. “Come in. Sit down. You want coffee?”

“Sure.” I pulled out a chair. “What are you working on?”

“UCLA.” He said it the way people say root canal. “Amy is starting in the fall. Freshman stuff.”

Amy gave me a small wave without looking up. She had a pen in her hand and was turning it end over end, the way people do when they’ve been thinking too hard for too long. She couldn’t have been more than 17. The whole world was in front of her.

I watched her highlight something on the form, cross it out, highlight it again, and felt a familiar pang — not quite guilt, not quite pity. More like the particular discomfort of a man who knows something he probably shouldn’t say out loud.

Because here’s what I knew: approximately ninety-five percent of what this girl had spent the last four years learning — the stuff that had landed her in an honors program, that had gotten her into UCLA, that her parents had lost sleep over would never come up again. Not once. Not in any room she’d ever sit in for the rest of her life. Unless she made it to the challenge round on Jeopardy. And even then, it was a gamble.

I know this because I lived it.

I spent the better part of my twenties in a low-grade panic over grammar. Starting a sentence with a preposition felt like jaywalking — technically survivable, but you kept expecting someone to blow a whistle. Restaurant bills made me sweat. Not the amount. The percentage. The tip. I’d sit there running calculations in my head while my food got cold, absolutely convinced that if I got it wrong, some authority figure was going to emerge from the kitchen, point at me, and announce my failure to the world.

And the capitals. God help me, the state capitals. I have lived in four states. Four. I could care less what the other 46 capitals are. I’ve never thought about what’s happening in Pierre, South Dakota, and Pierre, South Dakota has never once thought about me, but I can tell you it’s the capital of South Dakota. That information is just in there now, taking up space that could have been used for something — anything — else.

I watched Amy chew on her pen cap and decided to say nothing.

Then Ray slid a pamphlet across the table.

“Do you understand this?” He tapped it with two fingers. “Because I don’t.”

I picked it up. It was a meal plan options packet from UCLA. Standard size, eight and a half by eleven, which was where the standards ended. Someone in the university’s communications department had decided, at some point during the design process, that the ideal backdrop for a page of printed meal plan information was a full-color food pyramid graphic. And not a subtle one. A robust, enthusiastic food pyramid, rendered in the kind of saturated colors you use when you want to be seen from a considerable distance.

The text had been printed over it in size seven font.

Size seven.

I held the page closer. Then farther. I tilted it toward the window. The little illustrated bread loaves and protein icons were not illustrating the text so much as consuming it — sitting right on top of the words like they’d staked a claim. I could make out fragments. If you select Plan B and your schedule includes... A grain graphic. ...then refer to the supplemental options listed in... A tiny cartoon chicken.

“Hang on,” I said.

Ray and Amy watched me read with the attentiveness of people who had already given up.

After a few minutes of focused squinting, I believed I had the general shape of what they were asking. It was a patchwork of ifs and thens that spiraled outward without ever arriving at a when. Select your meal plan now, in June. Commit to it. The only relevant variable — her class schedule, which would determine when she could actually eat — wouldn’t be available until September.

“They want you to choose how you’re going to eat,” I said, setting it down, “before you know when you’re going to have time to eat.”

“Yes,” said Ray.

“And someone proofread this.”

“Apparently.”

We all looked at the pamphlet for a moment.

“What if I have a lab during lunch?” Amy asked.

“Then I think you refer to appendix C,” I said. “Or possibly the chicken.”

She picked it up again, gamely, and we went back to work. The three of us around the kitchen table — Ray, Amy, and me — applying our combined ages, educations, and life experiences to a single sheet of paper that had defeated us individually. We cross-referenced. We made notes in the margins. We held it up to the light once, just to see if that helped. It did not.

An hour later, we finished.

The high fives were real. Amy laughed, full and genuine, for the first time since I’d arrived. Ray leaned back in his chair with the exhausted dignity of a man who had done something hard and done it right. I felt, not inaccurately, like we had accomplished something.

“You know what this is good practice for?” I said, gathering my jacket. “Social Security Amy. Forty eight years from now, you’re going to sit down with a federal form that makes this look like a birthday card, and you’re going to be ready.”

Amy looked at me, scrunged up her face and said “Huh?”

“Honor student,” Ray casually said to me, by way of explanation.

I said my goodbyes and backed out into the afternoon, pulled onto the freeway as the sun went flat against the horizon. Somewhere back there was a kitchen table with three coffee cups on it, a pamphlet that had finally been conquered, and a girl about to walk into the rest of her life carrying more than she knew.

And in the quiet of the car, without meaning to, I found myself thinking about my 30th high school reunion

I had spotted Mr. Matthews, my high school math teacher, across the room almost immediately. He hadn’t changed much. Same posture. Same watchful patience, the kind that math teachers develop like a callus after years of waiting for students to find the right answer. He was talking to two other people, and I stood nearby until the conversation wound down, then stepped forward.

“Mr. Matthews.” I extended my hand. “Kenny Kates.”

He leaned back slightly and looked down at my name tag. Then up. A recognition settled into his face — the careful kind, the kind that’s working to match a name to thirty years of accumulated students.

“Hi Kenny,” he said.

I blurted out the Pythagorean theorem. “The Pythagorean theorem states that in a right-angled triangle, the sum of the squares of the two legs and equals the square of the hypotenuse” I said proudly to Mr. Mathews.

Mr. Matthews stared at me. Then his face opened up into something close to wonder.

“Kenny,” he said, delighted. “I am shocked you remember that after all these years.”

I smiled at him. Let it sit for just a beat.

“I do remember it, Mr. Matthews,” I said. “And today is the first time in thirty years I’ve had to use it and by the way, I still don't know what x is.

30 years later the Pythagorean theorem popped up to settle in a long forgotten corner of my brain. There it resided with state capitals, multiplication tables, the Gettysburg Address and God only knows how many other things I had committed to memory and had long since forgotten. Thirty years of mental storage, and the one time it paid off, my audience was a retired math teacher at a buffet table in a Holiday Inn.