Names
posted January 26, 2009
I have four of them, which is not normal but also not remarkable. I am not like the mother of a friend, whose middle name is the letter L like Truman’s S because her parents never decided on any more than that. I am also not Haim Shalom, whom I assumed was Israeli, or at least Jewish, but turns out just to have been named by hippies. Being longer than usual is my name’s primary feature.
Two are my parents' last names; one, my first, means something about the sea and was chosen for its seeming immunity to teasing perversions. The remaining name is my first middle name, which is “Lewis.” For years, I assumed that I carry the name of the long chain of Louis Dequines that eventually produced my mother, which includes people called Lou but also people called “Tuffy.” The spelling difference probably should have concerned me earlier, but I have only recently begun considering different explanations.
I should probably just ask my parents, but it has been easier to excavate mutilated half-memories of childhood explanations. So far, I have two.
My earliest thought about “Lewis” was, I think, that I was named for a childhood friend, Jordy Lewis. (He would probably prefer to be called Jordan now.) This made sense to me because he was the only person I knew who was also called Lewis. This impression stayed with me until I forgot about it.
A more reasonable, but less cohesive, explanation is that I was named for an old friend of my father. I half-remember this knowledge but never being told it explicitly: Lewis, for my dad’s old acting friend, Lewis. This memory also connects to another, hazier one in which someone visited the house. The memories of a four-year-old suggest that Lewis is a small person, and that his wife is also, and that his car is fitted with special pedal extenders to accommodate his legs. Lewis stayed for a day and left; it bewildered this memory’s four-year-old that his namesake could enter his life and leave it again so quickly and casually. What a scar it certainly left, a scar made by the uncountable unanswered questions about how life is when one of your names is Lewis.
This story is satisfying. I will not ask my parents.