A Rose by Any Other Name. . .

. . . would have a perm and drive a pick-up.

I share my first name with both my father and grandfather.  Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that my grandfather shares his first name with both of us, but you get the picture.  In my dad’s case, he also bears the same middle name as my grandfather making him a full-blown junior.  Me, I’ve got a different second name, though it starts with the same letter,

From left to right: M-, M- and M-

meaning I don’t have to append ‘III’ to my name or declare myself to be ‘the third.’  That would, I think, have been absurdly pretentious and I’m grateful my parents decided to give me the middle name I have.

In fact, that middle name has been useful as more than just a justification for not following my name with any numbers.  Because there are three of us with the same first name the potential for confusion is great, especially when we’re all together.  For much of my life my family has called me by both my first and second names together.  Before that I was apparently so fixated on my middle name that was what I demanded to be known by and hailed as.  The only people in the world who call me by both names are relatives and a few of my parents’ friends.  In other words they are a group who’ve known me as long as I’ve known myself, possibly longer, and I find something solid and reassuring about their use of my two names.

Outside my family, in my professional and social life, I’m known simply by my first name.   I do include my middle initial in my signature and on various documents I’m the author of,  but the people who know me in any capacity just call me M-.  This has been the case since I started first grade at a new school following my family’s move from Illinois to Massachusetts.  When I introduced myself to the class by the name I share with two other people I did so impulsively.  My five (or was it six?) year old brain hadn’t thought through what I was doing, or what I wanted to be called.  Instead, when Miss Savoy asked me to tell the class my name I just blurted out ‘M-.’  I then went on to inform her and the class, having been asked, that I didn’t have an accent because I wasn’t the one who sounded funny when I talked.  They were the ones with the strange way of speaking.  I bet she was thrilled to have the new boy at the school in her class.

So why did I suddenly shorten my name that first day?  Does it even matter?  I think it does, because in my childish way I was groping after something.  I wanted others to take me as seriously as I took myself  and applying what I saw as an adult label to myself was a step in that direction.  I was playing a metaphorical game of dress-up with my father’s and grandfather’s name, similar yet different to mine, in the same way I might have played at being an adult by slipping into my father’s business shoes or wanting to watch baseball games with him and his friend.  It was also at this age that I liked to find any excuse I could to wear a tie.  I wasn’t sure where I was going, but at some level I was in a damn hurry to get there.

I’m not sure that anyone who doesn’t share a name with a parent or grandparent, who doesn’t use that name on a regular basis, can really understand what it’s like.  I can see how, for some people, that a shared name might be a source of exasperation or even feel like a burden.  It doesn’t work that way for me.  I’m proud to have the the same name as my father and grandfather.  I’ve never felt any pressure to live up to my name.  Instead it’s made me a member of a little club of three.  There are no secret handshakes and no special rituals, but there is some additional, understated current of recognition that comes from us all having the same name even when, at large family gatherings, someone wants a picture of the 3 M-s together for the 15th time in 2 hours.

I don’t believe that our paths through life are predetermined but I do think that in some case, mine included, a name can actually play a role in shaping the kind of paths we have to choose from.  Names are powerful things largely because they are one of the first and primary ways we hear our distinct, individual identities identified.  In turn they are a primary means for our articulation and declaration of our identity.  They  allow us a strongly suggestive way of finishing the fundamental statement ‘I am . . .’

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet as some guy who wasn’t called Bill once said, but I honestly don’t think I’d have the same odour if my parents hadn’t decided to give me my grandfather’s and father’s first name.  They almost didn’t because my father was, so I’ve been told, worried that I might be saddled with diminutive nick names that I wouldn’t like as a way of distinguishing me from the two ‘M-s’ already in the family.  Instead they’d planned to call me Jesse.

There’s nothing wrong with the name Jesse, but I’ve always suspected that my life would have been different had I born that label.  For starters it would have been a source for the endless amusement of others here in England as jesse is a an unflattering slang term.  I probably could have found a way of living with  that.  The thing is I’m not sure I ever would have made it to England had I been called Jesse.  I can’t imagine that name on the title page of my doctoral dissertation, nor can I imagine myself delivering lectures to students who knew me as Jesse.

Why do I think these things?  Well, it’s because I suspect that being known as Jesse would have emphasised other traits of my personality, accentuated different aspects of my identity.  I pretty sure that I would have liked the person I would have been had I been known as Jesse and that he’d be the kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with on a regular basis.  We’d both like cowboy boots and be fans of the St Louis Cardinals.  At the same time I also suspect that I would have followed a rather different path through life than the one that’s led me to where I am now.  When I imagine myself as a Jesse I always see some guy with permed hair and a pick-up truck.