My parents used to refer to me as a "mobile encyclopedia".
I know it sounds like boasting, but one can't really boast about having a good memory any more than one can be proud of being tall. Most of it is genetics and the rest is probably a good diet when you were a kid.
My memory is like mating fly paper with a sieve. It is the weirdest and not always the most useful things that stick.
But after we moved from Denmark to USA, I often find myself deficient.
Newspaper quizzes where I can't answer half the questions - not even from the easy part of the quiz. My scores at word jumbles are pathetic. There are whole areas of life, like biology, where my previous rich knowledge doesn't translate at all.
But then again, having grown up somewhere else, should I really be expected to know English nursery rhymes? Or the name of a turtle in Dr. Seuss? Or actors from the Brady Bunch?
Hey, I know that a million years ago there was a series called the Brady Bunch. Doesn't that count for something?
Today I felt totally vindicated by this entertaining - and horrifying - News of the Day video by Rabbi Yonason Goldson.
Perhaps I can't answer the many questions on actors and sports figures that apparently count as common knowledge because I don't watch a lot of TV or read tabloid magazines?
But I can name more than one Supreme Court Justice because I read a newspaper or two.
Most immigrants to the United States who have ever thought of becoming citizens can name at least three.
Can you?