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Is there a special name for the tops of your feet…?

For some reason I have never really liked my first name. Unlike my other two middle ones it seems an arbitrary choice; there aren’t any patriarchal traditions necessitating it or anything. I suppose I should look upon it as a special gift, but I don’t. As a child, I was so distressed at it that at the start of one year at grade school, I decided to use one of my middle names and instructed the teacher to call me ‘Jamie’, but she kept forgetting, much to the enjoyment and teasing from the rest of the class. And anyway, I later found out that they used that unsuitable first name on my initial passport and on any documents required to discharge my mother and I from the Biggar Hospital (I was born in ‘New York is big, but this is Biggar -it’s deep in the prairies of Saskatchewan if you must know).

As far as I can tell, my mother (who made all the important decisions in our family) was not responding to any wider cultural naming patterns. And anyway, we were in Biggar then for goodness sakes: a small prairie town likely only kept afloat by the railway which ran through it, and for which my father worked.  We moved a lot, however, so I suppose it is possible that my mother picked up some cultural trends in another of his postings. I, however, was not privy to any opinions at birth, although I apparently cried a lot in those less than halcyon days… maybe she was just reacting to that; maybe in Biggar, most of the babies were quiet, as befits the vast rolling grasslands in which the town was born.

Frankly, I suspect my first name was a quick and arbitrary decision when she was asked to register me. I do not believe I was in the vanguard of any cultural shift. All babies are petulant are they not? Especially if they were mistakes -although she has always denied that.

And yes, pre-nuptially, my father was a Baptist, and my mother an Anglican, so they both forsook their respective gods and settled on joining the less stringent United Church much to the chagrin of their parents. So, apart from the James part of my middle names, the other two names were not at all Biblically derived. I am therefore, as I now believe, an unintentional Apostate.

No attempt, as far as I know, was made to pretend originality at my baptism and my memory of it is, at best, hazy. There was no effort to suborn whatever gods may be with something clever like heaven spelled backwards: Nevaeh. My parents weren’t 21rst century moderns back in the 40ies thank goodness. Trends, without the assistance of algorithms, or social media, were just not available in those days. Patriarchy was, I suppose, but luckily my mother felt no need to tack on the names of several unimportant male relatives for me to have to drag them and their hyphens along behind me. We are not a patriarchal family; my mother wouldn’t allow that.

I will say that, given I already had a much older brother when she discovered she was ‘with child’, my mother had put in a priority request for a female baby. Her preferences were apparently fairly obvious to Biggarites, so I suspect she was glad of the impending move back West to Edmonton where she could pretend a little longer. Her creative variations of my name only included a few minor consonantal omissions that fooled no one.

My first name, thankfully, was not gender-neutral; I assume they hadn’t invented those yet. I remained innocent and not subject to any of the popular purges that seemed to simmer in all of the places to which my father was transferred. The only concession to my mother’s disappointment at both my given sex and its accompanying gender was my head of unruly and by and large untrimmed, curly hair which caused no end of teasing as I fought my way ever upwards in my education. In retrospect, however, I suspect she was both glad and relieved that I was a boy, and that she had named me unambiguously as such. And anyway, I have never considered myself ambiguous; I simply don’t like my first name, and I have always believed in my biological identity.

Winnipeg of the 50ies where we ended up when I was a school-requiring child, was also a bubbling stew of many disparate ingredients, and (first) names like Maris, Luigi (both 1 and 2 g’d), Bogdan (which we kids transformed into Broken), and even Slawomir (with its obvious transmutation into Coleslaw -or more often, simply Salad) were common amongst my classmates. I hesitate to mention a friend who was in my Gym class that was stuck with the unusual name of ‘Vuk’ (I won’t mention what that morphed into…) Mine, fortunately, was more difficult to transform, so I tried to convince a few of them to call me ‘G’ (which was a simplified form of the nickname my parents used on me in my house for years). Only a few of my classmates (and notably not including any of my various teachers) complied, however.

But, maybe that’s what names are really for anyway: Handles. The things we grasp to get the owner’s attention. Along the way they may pick up a little lint, or reshape themselves as necessary for the occasion, but as long as they’re still attached to the person who owns them, they serve a function.

And even if, over the years, the embarrassment they once engendered has faded, even a faux name becomes an essential part of you. I suppose that, in a way though, I still am my legal first name, although I never use it unless a custom agent at the border asks me: in person I am usually smiling, but passports nowadays insist that the picture makes you look robotic and uncaring for some reason.

I have to hope my first name is not a homologue for the others, or anything… You’ll just have to guess. I mean it wasn’t my fault, eh?

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