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A.K.A.

I think I ought to tell you that I’ve been living incognito for most of my life. When I was twelve, I was an aspiring rodeo rider. Here’s the picture: blue jeans, western shirt, cowboy hat, and braids. I’m galloping along the High Line Canal that flows through the prairie near my house; my scruffy, little quarter horse, Gypsy, is loyally playing her part.

 

My name fit me then. By high school my plans changed. I wanted to be unique, desirable, a muse. Peggy was a name that had tomboy dud stuck to its back. I needed something exotic to be the heroine in the romantic novel of my life.

 

I found it, the name not the novel, at my sister’s college graduation. She went to some fancy college in the East. The family drove cross-country in our Ford two-tone station wagon to witness the event. It was incredible. To my prairie lifestyle the dorms looked like mansions; the landscape was a green rain forest compared to Colorado. My sister’s best friend was Greek. Greek! She had an accent so. . . foreign. . .so sexy. She smoked cigarettes nonchalantly- right in front of my parents! She talked about some guys Sartre and Camus. She was so COOL. Her name was Meris. That’s Greek for “The Sea”.

 

I stole the name outright. When I got back to Arapahoe High School, I became Meris. It was a placebo affectation. Meris was an Artist.

 

My parents were totally confounded by the seismic change that was happening to me. The braids? Gone. Hair so long and wild that my dad offered to pay me “to tie up that mop!” When I pierced my ears my mother called me a “Hoopie!” (What!?) Heavy eyeliner and tight hip hugger jeans rounded out my costume. I read existential novels. And, that was just the beginning. It was the sixties. . .
 

I started to keep a file of unusual names. I’d scroll through them like the credits at the end of a movie. I learned that names are powerful and sometimes deceptive. Names assert a vision, an illusion. Names can tell the whole story without the story.

 

This manipulation of my persona continued through art college. Life then was a cocktail of visceral gratification. In high school men were mostly boys and they had names like Ron, Steve, Mike . . . In college Mauricio was one of my favorite names in the file.
 

Did you think the continuing story was going to be Meris migrating to SoHo and captivating the art world? I had a bourgeois breakdown instead. I wanted the comfort of a regular job to support my art habit. Regular meant being an urban elementary art teacher. I acquired a couple of extra names: The education bureaucracy called me Itinerant, as in expendable, and the kids called me Art, as in “Art is just the name of the guy”.

 

Teaching in the inner city is like wearing a nicotine patch if you’ve never smoked before. I did become famous in a way. The art teacher, purveyor of that golden hour of fun twice a month, is a major celebrity to the twelve and under set. Of course there is frustration, exhaustion, and tension, as any celebrity will tell you, but teaching was a jackpot for my name file.

 

Italian kids dominated my first school. I felt like I was surrounded by characters in a Fellini movie. My favorites? Filomena Tirocchi. Angelo DiFazio. Elvira Berdarducci. In sixth grade, poor Elvira got knocked up by her father. But, she came to school every day so that she could be with her sixth grade boyfriend. She had to withdraw during her sixth month because she couldn’t fit into her school desk. So much for Wonder Bread existentialism.

 

Because my name was Itinerant, I also taught at another school. The students are mostly generic white with a sprinkling of black kids bussed in after the riots. It’s 1971. My file filled up with Motown names – Aretha, Germaine, Michael – and black consciousness names – Malcolm, Rasheed, Jamal. Then there was Tode, small, vacant. When I took attendance the first day I didn’t know it was pronounced Todd. How is a middle class alias supposed to know?

 

Did I mention that I married Mauricio? My lexicon of names increased exponentially with that one simple ceremony. I went to Colombia to meet the family of staid oligarchs. Ironically, they had sabotaged their proper names: Enrique was called Profe – short for professor, Maria Clara was call Melotunas, MariaTeresa was called TeTe, Leonor was called Palo, and Rafael was called Pooky. Maria Ignacia Josefina Rita Margarita Julia Herrera de Barreto, Mauricio’s mother, was called Julia.

 

In the seventies I had to pack up my Conestoga art wagon and pioneer another school in the south of the city. Here the students were mostly Hispanic and Asian. I’d had Berlitz interval training in Colombia, so I was looking forward to practicing my Spanish skills.

 

Little Lally was my favorite in the Limited English class. She was all curls, powder pink frill, and paten leather, a miniature Latina siren. That autumn the class was painting pumpkins. When the red hit the yellow it swirled into a Kindergarten miracle. Lally squealed with ecstasy. I was canonized on the spot. Isn’t it true? You’re never prepared for some names. Lesbia was the official name on her report card.

 

The Asian kids were part of the tsunami of displaced Asian children that flooded our schools. Tiny, ancient souls silenced by napalm and camp terrors. They are ever so solemn and patient when I try to fit my angular voice into the spherical resonance of Thai, Cambodian, or Hmong pronunciations: Xiong, Sosathabna, Thipphava, and Zoua. I like to imagine that they all go home after school and hoot and howl with laughter over Western names like Peggy or Meris. When Kha Kha enrolled in school, I worried how that poor kid was going to survive school scatological warfare.

 

My first child was a black and tan Bloodhound. He remained nameless for a month while Mauricio - also a compulsive name master - and I fretted and haggled over the right name. Finally our saggy, sloppy, dear boy was named Bubba. As any good southerner will tell you that is what you call the first-born son.

 

Having survived the tribulations of parenting a willful, wandering canine, we decided to try parenting a Homo Sapien. The name jousting lasted nine months. Mauricio put up names like José Maria, Baltazar, and Sancho. I was apoplectic. As far as I was concerned, Sancho was the fat dude who rode a donkey behind that skinny seventeenth century nut with old age dementia. In the end, the hospital nurse brought me breakfast and a card to fill out for the birth certificate. I wrote in Julia. When I’m feeling especially maternal, I call her JuJu.

 

The teaching habit has frayed me out like old jeans. The daily routine, the mundane demands dull the sense of inquiry, adventure, and risk. I fight to keep the Meris in my life even if only sporadically. But, the prospect of a surge of inspiration is like a wish and a prophecy.

 

Ten years later another school. This school becomes my nightmare and my epiphany. The children are project waifs from disrupted, corrupted, bankrupted families, barely surviving the American cultural war. A day in this school is like participating in a scene from Marat-Sade. I’ve seen children as young as nine restrained and handcuffed by the police. Weapons brought from home. Names like Desiree, Prince, Sir Joseph, Major, and Glory are used to spackle the cracks. They are tough, brazen, and vulnerable as porcelain in an earthquake zone. Four letter invectives or bear hugs can erupt at any given moment.

 

Marcus was handsome as a movie star. He had a crush on me in kindergarten; he told me that I looked like Cinderella. His anger started to metastasize as he grew up. By second grade he was wearing the colored beads of the Latin Kings; his eyebrows were shaved in vertical gashes gang style. What parent outfits a child like that? In third grade our relationship was adversarial, verging on the hysterical. In fourth grade he snapped. In show of defiance - or despair - he put his arm under the machete blade of the paper cutter on my desk. I was only steps away, but just in time.

 

Did I mention the arrival of African children fleeing tribal conflict: Mobolagi? Omabola? Foday? The Haitian children escaping climate calamities, endemic poverty and violence: Elifet? Lovelie? Wilky?
 
The cerulean blue pills are good for quelling the rage and fear that occupy my mind some days when I can’t shut off the whining replay of this documentary. But I am luckier than some teachers. Artwork provides the healing catharsis. It is the visual salvation of my soul.

 

I think I ought to tell you that I’m a liar. I guess we all hide behind names that are wishes. Me? Margaret Ruth is on my birth certificate. I’m named after both my grandmothers. The names are impossibly heavy, Victorian and biblical. How did I get so weighed down?

 

Next decade, the children have been arriving with names that are hyphens and apostrophes: Trey-del, V-dal, Tea’quondra, Shi’wana, and Ja’neice. Are they metaphors for lyrics that fit some beat I don’t know? A gap in my white suburban upbringing?

 

Last week, on the front page of the newspaper, there was a picture of Marcus, now age sixteen. Suicide. He shot himself in the head with a pistol, the same pistol that he was playing with when he accidentally shot his best friend.

 

A new child enrolled in school last week. Her name is Thend, pronounced “the end”. Maybe. Thirty years is a long time to work at anything, especially the panoramic cinema of humanity. I’m seriously thinking about the sequel to my life in names.

 

I’m thinking about gardening in Technicolor. Get these! Fritillaria (Checkered Lily), Hyancinthoides (Spanish Bluebells), Monarda (Bee Balm), Physostegia (False Dragonhead), Polygonatum (Solomon’s Seal).

 

Yes. Start a new collection.

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