Whatshername shouldn’t take offense at dad’s forgetfulness

‘Because I Said So’ column for The Commercial Appeal

Jan. 31, 2013

Names not so important if you can’t recall them

The best part of having a baby isn’t its cherubic smile or the smell of the top of a newborn’s head. That’s all myth, anyway. No, the best part of having an offspring is getting to name it.

I’ve had four, and they never really smelled all that good. So, for me, bestowing a name upon each of them has been the best. It’s an opportunity to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald as he put Gatsby into the vernacular, or Mario Puzo with Don Corleone. Penning that first and middle name on a birth certificate must be what Stan Lee felt like when he first inked “Peter Parker” and “Spider-Man.”

The names we give our children come from different sources: literature or film, ancestors, geography. We might take the name of a favorite aunt or a distant relative, one we later learn is somewhat of a family pariah. It happens. There are names biblical, musical, nautical and foreign.

It’s an awesome responsibility, saddling a brand new person with a handle he’ll carry around for life. Up until that moment a tiny human person makes her appearance, the only experience most of us have had with names is in naming a pet. Such a thin line between Fido and Katherine.

In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. Not for me, anyway, as I can’t remember my own kids’ names from minute to minute. Oh, I can list them if asked: Calvin, Joshua, Somerset and Genevieve.

But when they’re standing right in front of me, that’s a different matter. I cannot seem to say the name of whoever is there, and it amuses them to no end. Most of what I do distresses them, but they take great pleasure in pointing out my mistake.

“You called me Somerset,” Genevieve says.

“Yes, I know, but whoever you are needs to pick that ice cream up off the floor.”

There is something triggered in my mind in those moments, synapses not fully bridged. What I’ve begun doing is to just say both of their names to cover my bases so that my daughters, despite whichever I’m looking at, become “Somersetgenevieve” and the boys, “Calvinjoshua.” When I’m angry, forget it; any combination could issue forth from my mouth, some unprintable in a family newspaper.

I don’t know why this happens with my children, because it doesn’t happen with anything else. I don’t walk into the kitchen and refer to the refrigerator as a microwave oven. I don’t hold a meatloaf I’ve made and tell Somersetgenevieve that we’re having tuna casserole for dinner. I don’t refer to our mail carrier as Margaret because that is not his name.

It may be genetic. When I visit my mother, I share a name with my brothers as we morph into “Johndavidrichard.”

It’s a mystery, one I will contemplate while I go into the kitchen to take the tuna casserole from the dishwasher for little Doncorleonepeterparker and Gatsby-what’s-his-name to eat.

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