By any other name would smell as sweet.
- Juliet Capulet in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
Maybe a little background might be helpful here. My father sometimes lives in an alternate reality, calling things by their scientific name with little regard to whether anyone else knows what he is talking about. "This sure is good oncorhynchus mykiss," he'd tell my mom at dinner. Or, "Kids, keep it down back there, or so help me I'll lecture you on the harmful affects of loud noises on the scala tympani, scala vestibuli, and scala media." Seriously, he will. My siblings and I were the only kids in our elementary school who knew all the intricacies of the inner ear.
Artemisia Tridentata is the scientific name for the common mountain sagebrush found in Idaho, his home state and where I was born. My nickname was going to be Arty. Can't you just hear the childhood taunts? Thankfully, his mother put the kibosh on that. "She's a baby, not a bush," I can hear my Grandma Lew say. Instead I was named after my parent's sisters. My mom's sister Amy and my dad's sister Jean. Saddle a kid with a name like Artemisia and she's likely to grow up and go to a hippie liberal arts college and get a degree in something useless, like, English.
When my sister arrived in our family, equally unexpectantly, I remember having a family meeting where we determined her name. My brother and I made many suggestions and it was fun thinking of all the possibilities. Artemisia was never suggested, although Princess Leia or Annie might have been. My parents finally decided on the name Marie, the middle name of my father's mother. Grandma Lew hated her first name, Almetta, as much as I would have hated Artemisia and always went by the name Marie. I think the name Marie is a very pretty name and is too often relegated to the obscurity of the middle.
Audrey is also learning how much I like the name Marie, because I keep calling her that. Surprisingly enough, some parents have difficulty remembering their own children's names. Maybe Dr. Seuss' Mrs. McCave had the right idea after all:
Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that wasn't a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one, and calls out "Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!" she doesn't get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!
This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves'
As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn.
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate...
But she didn't do it. And now it's too late.
First of all, Mrs. McCave how do you get all 23 of them to come running with one call? Surely it's not simply saying Yoo-Hoo. But I'd rather have all my kids come running than endure the uproar that ensues when I call Nathan Eli or Eli Audrey. Ah, the indignity. They've learned to work around my lapses in memory, sometimes to their advantage. "You said Eli, not me." "Yah, but I meant you."
Back to my original thought, the problem lately is when I call Audrey Marie. I'm not taking the fall here all by myself. Jon has the same problem, only he calls her Lydia. Both of our sisters are somewhat younger than us and our theory is that because we left home when they were still children, they are eternally fixed in our minds under the tag 'the little girl that lives at my house.' So since Audrey is currently 'the little girl that lives at our house,' it's easy to see where confusion occurs. Easy for us that is - I've had to explain to my friends a few times who this Marie person is that I'm always taking about.
My parents probably decided on the name Amy Jean just like we should have decided on Marie Lydia or Lydia Marie. Because then we would be right, even when we're wrong. The names we chose for our children each have significant meaning for us, and we hope, eventually, for them. But I have to wonder if maybe we should have chosen more outlandish names, ensuring that Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face would never be confused with Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate. Or Artemisia Tridentata.
