A Step Into Memory

“This popular game show brought attention to Longmont, Colo. and memories to a local columnist.”

“Ken, what is ‘Jeopardy!’?”

“Correct!”

Like a lot of former reporters, I’m a “Jeopardy!” fan. Journalists have a habit of picking up a lot of odd facts in a wide variety of fields – someone once called it a ‘wastebasket mind’ – so the trivia game with the guess-the-question format has a natural appeal.

So when Longmont resident Stephen Webb began racking up the big bucks on the blue board, I got as excited as anyone. At this writing, he’s been the champ for three straight games, living the dream for all of us armchair trivia buffs.

Including one who really ought to be here watching.

My friend Mark Scheidies had a mind made for “Jeopardy!” That’s not just hyperbole. He made the contestant pool six different times. Had the world been different, he’d probably be trying yet again to become the third Longmonter to win big on the show (following both Webb and previous champion Jennifer Giles).

An accident claimed Mark in 2020. But even without a “Jeopardy!” appearance, he still left behind some indelible memories. As a treasured Longmont Theatre Company actor. As a gentle man with a wry sense of humor.

And, for a few months in 2013, as the “Longmont Street Walker.”

It’s not what it sounds like. (That wry humor again.) In 2013, Mark set out to walk every mile of every street in Longmont. It took him over 1.5 million steps, but he did it, blogging the journey after each new expedition.

In the process he rediscovered the city he’d been living in for 30 years. And reintroduced a lot of us to it as well.

“Even though I’ve driven a street many times, there are still things that I will notice walking that I have never noticed driving,” Mark wrote.

Yes. Yes. A hundred times, yes.

I’m not in Mark’s class as a walker OR a trivia champion. (Our epic battle of Trivial Pursuit never did happen, and I’m probably less humiliated for it.) But in my own lengthy walks across Longmont, I’ve noticed the same thing. Driving gives you tunnel vision. Your mind locks on your destination and (hopefully) the drivers around you, but you don’t really experience much beyond that bubble of thought.

Walking forces you to pay attention.

You learn where every dog in the neighborhood is – or at least what their bark sounds like.

“Where the Sidewalk Ends” is no longer just a Shel Silverstein poem, but an occasional reality. (And a challenging one if you’re also pushing a relative’s wheelchair, but I digress.)

You discover shortcuts. Faces. Interesting sights that get missed at 30 mph but become glaringly obvious at one-tenth that speed.

In short, you learn to see. And that’s a rare skill.

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote of the importance of “recovery,” the ability to clean off your mental windows and actually notice things that have become commonplace. It means not just telling yourself “oh, another tree,” so you can put it in its box and move on, but actually seeing the tree as though you had never seen one before: its texture, its color, its life.

Life at walking speed makes a good window-cleaner. No bubble, no isolation – just a world close enough to touch, or at least to notice.

Mark’s blog Is still up at www.longmontstreetwalker.com. The sidewalks await any time. It doesn’t have to be an epic journey. Even a few steps can make a big difference.

And if you plan it right, you’ll even get home in time for “Jeopardy!”

Venus, If You Will

Look! Up in the sky!

Well, actually, I hope you didn’t. I know you value having eyesight and all.

Most of my friends know that I’m a certified space geek. On Tuesday I had an awful lot of company. Around the world, people were looking through telescopes, watching computer monitors or otherwise doing everything they could to safely watch the “transit of Venus.”

It might not sound worth the effort to some. After all, it’s basically the world’s tiniest eclipse, as Venus moves across the sun like a lost penny across a football field. But as the Franklin Mint likes to remind us, rarity has a certain value. You get two of these transits eight years apart – and then you have to wait more than 100 years for the next one.

OK. So it’s rare. Big deal. So are copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special, right?

Granted. But unless you’re into really bad Wookie fiction, I’d pick the transit any day. For a tiny disc, it tends to inspire a lot of frenzy.

The transits of the 1760s may have been the wildest, as European scientists tried to scatter across the world to see if they could record the event from different points – and, incidentally, find out just how far the Earth was from the Sun. And while it was Captain Cook’s 1769 measurements that helped fix the distance (about 93 million miles, for the record), the struggles of those who didn’t quite make it eight years earlier make even more entertaining reading – entertaining, that is, in the sense of “Boy, I’m glad that wasn’t me.”

“Jean Chappe spent months traveling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The swelling was due to unusually heavy rainfall, which the locals in turn blamed on the strange man pointing odd objects at the sky.

First impressions. So important.

These days, no one had to be Indiana Jones to measure the transit, but it was still worth measuring. Last time, Venus helped us find ourselves. This time, it may help us find the neighbors. By watching Venus, we know a little more about how to find planets in other solar system, work out how big they are, maybe even piece out a little more about their atmosphere.

Not bad for a view from the cheap seats, huh?

It’s also very reassuring for a teacher’s son. Most teachers have said at some point that there’s no such thing as a stupid question (and almost immediately get students who try to prove them wrong). I tend to believe something very similar – that there’s no such thing as useless knowledge.

Role-playing games taught me how to calculate percentages.

Children’s mysteries helped me learn how to estimate distance.

Even something as light as studying stage dialects has helped with getting Missy to brush her teeth at night. (It pays to use an outrageous French accent to count how much is left to do, even if the giggles do tend to spatter the mirror a bit.)

When everything fits with everything, anything can be good to know.

So watching Venus dance across the Sun? Why not? You never know when it might come in handy.

You simply can’t planet.