I said, “What name were you thinking of as a name for this lovely little addition to your family, Ruthie?”
And Ruthie said, “Static Cling.”
“What if it’s not a boy?” I asked her.
She said, “Freezer Burn.”
When the baby came, it was a boy and they named him Calvin. They preferred Calvin to Static Cling. The same week, I got a birth announcement from Rhode Island—another Calvin. Now I think we might be on a roll.
Being named Calvin has not been all negative. During the first term of the Reagan Administration—what I believe historians now refer to as Voodoo I—I was asked by the government to make a cultural-exchange visit to South America. I was surprised to be asked. I had, in my role as jackal of the press, said some unkind things about the Administration. I had speculated, for instance, that for a long time President Reagan had been under the impression that Polaris was a denture cleanser. When the question came up of how close the Reagans were as a family, I had reported the rumor that a trailing photographer on Fifth Avenue had witnessed Ronald Reagan, Jr., wave and yell “Hiya, Dad!” to a man who turned out to be Joel McCrea. “What good sports they are!” I thought. “Sending me to South America anyway on a cultural-exchange visit.” Then I got to thinking what the Administration’s idea of culture might be, and realized that I had been confused with Calvin Klein.
1990
Merger
Yes, of course I’ve been thinking about the marriage of Valerie Jane Silverman and Michael Thomas Flaherty—two fine-looking and richly accomplished graduates of Harvard, class of 1987—who tied the knot some weeks ago and adopted as a common family name Flaherman.
I did not need all of those telephone calls asking if I had, by chance, missed the Flahermans’ wedding announcement in the Sunday New York Times. I stated years ago that the wedding announcements have always been the first news I turn to on Sunday in the Times. It has been my custom to do some careful analysis of the family background of each bride and groom, and then to try to envision the tension at the wedding reception.
The names going into the marriage are, of course, helpful to that sort of vision—as is the assumption that every human being has at least one truly dreadful cousin. In an overtly bi-ethnic merger such as the marriage of Valerie Silverman to Michael Flaherty, I would ordinarily have wondered whether Mike Flaherty’s dingbat fourth cousin, who has been assuring all of the Silvermans that some of his best friends are Jewish, will actually fall into conversation toward the end of the evening with an equally brash cousin of Valerie Silverman’s who has been poking every Flaherty he meets in the ribs and saying, “I guess you’ve heard the one about Murphy, O’Leary, and the two priests.”
In recent years, though, the name taken after the wedding has added to my concerns. Whether or not the bride is going to retain her last name has become an important element in the announcement. You have to wonder whether the Nancy Jones who announces that she will be keeping her surname after marrying a young man named Chomoldsley Rhoenheushch is a committed feminist or a weak speller. And I’ve been wondering lately whether a wedding someday between, say, the son of Madonna and the daughter of Sting would produce a nice young couple who had to start married life with no last name at all.
The Flaherman nuptials were particularly interesting to me because of the possibility that their approach to merging names as well as lives was the outgrowth of a warning I issued fifteen years ago about the danger of liberated young couples combining surnames by connecting them with hyphens.
At the time, I pointed out that if Penelope Shaughnessy married Nathaniel Underthaler while her best friend, Jennifer Morganwasser, married Jeremiah Christianson, and then the children of those two unions, Jedidiah Shaughnessy-Underthaler and Abigail Morganwasser-Christianson, themselves got married, these offsprings would end up as a couple named Jedidiah and Abigail Shaughnessy-Underthaler-Morganwasser-Christianson. Which means that they could never expect to get their name into a newspaper headline unless it was a headline announcing, say, World War III.
I think what the Flahermans—and, presumably, others by now—have done is a resourceful solution to the problem of how modern women can retain their names without creating monikers that make the signature run off the line every single time. One of the people I talked to about this situation—those of us who are devoted to the wedding section of the Times are likely to be sharing impressions of this or that announcement late on a Sunday morning, when people in other households are discussing the trouble in the Balkans or thinking about turning to the breakfast dishes—said that Flaherman struck him as a less euphonious name than, for instance, Silverty, but I consider that a quibble.
So congratulations to the Flahermans. And what if they have a son who wins the hand of Daphne Shaughnessy-Underthaler-Morganwasser-Christianson? We’ll deal with that problem when we get to it.
1992
Incompatible, with One L
I married Alice under the assumption that she could spell “occurred.” She now insists that nothing specific was mentioned about “occurred.” It seems to me, though, that implicit in someone’s making a living as a college English teacher is the representation that she is a speller with a repertoire adequate to any occasion. She certainly knew that the only person in her line of work I had any experience being related to, my cousin Keith from Salina, reached the finals of the Kansas state spelling bee. She now says Cousin Keith’s spelling triumph was never spoken of between us. I distinctly remember, though, that I listed for Alice the highlights of our family’s history, as any prospective bridegroom might for his future wife, and Cousin Keith has always been part of my standard Family History recitation—along with my cousin Neil, who was once the head drum major of the University of Nebraska marching band, and my Uncle Benny Daynofsky, who in his early eighties was knocked down by a car while planting tomatoes in his own backyard in St. Joseph, Missouri. It is significant that she does not deny knowing about Uncle Benny.
Is spelling the sort of thing that modern young couples get straightened out beforehand in marriage contracts? I wouldn’t bring this up after all of these years, except that, as it happens, I can’t spell “occurred” either. I was forced to look it up twice in order to write the first paragraph, and once more to get this far in the second. Somehow, I had expected to marry someone whose spelling would be, if not perfect, at least complementary to mine. We would face the future with heads held high, and maybe a short song on our lips—confident that together we could spell anything they dished out. Before we had been married a month, the real world started to eat away at that fantasy: It turned out that Alice was not very good on “commitment.” I don’t mean she didn’t have any; she couldn’t spell it. I have never been able to spell “commitment” myself.
I know how to spell “embarrass”—usually considered by double-letter specialists to be a much more difficult word. I have been able to spell it for years. I planted “embarrass” in my mind at an early age through a rather brilliant mnemonic device having to do with bar stools. In fact, not to make a lot out of it, I had always thought of my ability to spell “embarrass” as a nice little facility to bring to a marriage—the sort of minor bonus that is sometimes found in a husband’s ability to rewire lamps. (I can’t rewire a lamp, but I can change the bulb, usually. That qualifies as what I believe is called an “allied skill.”) We have now been married thirteen years, and Alice still has not asked me how to spell “embarrass.” Apparently, she has a mnemonic device of her own. I have never inquired. That sort of thing doesn’t interest me.
For a while, our reformist friends used to urge us to make a list of the words that troubled both of us—their theory being that some wretched consistency in the American educational system would be further documented by the fact that a husband and wife who went to public schools thirteen hundred miles apart were left without the ability to spell precisely the same words. Converts to the new politics of lowered expectations have told me that I should sim
ply accept Alice’s spelling limitations and comfort myself with thoughts of the many splendid qualities she does have—the way Americans are now supposed to settle for only two gigantic automobiles, reminding themselves that some people in Chad have none at all. I have tried that. I have reminded myself that Alice can explain foreign movies and decipher road maps. I suspect that in a pinch she might be able to rewire a lamp. But, having come of drinking age in the 1950s, I may be culturally immune to the politics of lowered expectations. I can’t get over the suspicion that a politician who preaches that doctrine is really arguing that we ought to settle for him.
I still find myself thinking back on the old-fashioned scenes I had envisioned for our marriage: We are sitting peacefully in the parlor—after having kissed the little ones good night—and I glance up from the desk, where I have been polishing off a letter to the Times on our policy in the Far East, and say, “Alice, how do you spell ‘referred’?” Alice tells me. Or, on another evening, Alice looks over from her side of the desk (in this version of our marriage, the custodian of an abandoned courthouse in Pennsylvania had sold us an eighteenth-century double desk for eighty-five dollars including delivery to New York in his brother’s pickup), where she has been composing a letter to her parents saying how sublimely happy she is. She asks me how to spell “embarrass.” I tell her.
1978
Naming the German Baby
It’s been more than two months since I read in The Washington Post that in Germany the government has to approve the name of your child. I think my response to the Post item has paralleled the stages people sometimes move through in response to a family catastrophe, beginning with denial and going on to anger. I now remember specifically that the first words I uttered upon reading the item were “Get serious!”
But the story I’d just read was obviously real. In Germany, if the clerk in charge of such matters at your city hall doesn’t approve of the name you propose to give your newborn baby, you have to name the baby something else. That’s right: the clerk. The government says it’s a question of the clerk protecting the child. If they tried that in this country, the question would be who’s going to protect the clerk.
In Germany, on the other hand, there are all sorts of regulations like this that the citizenry docilely accepts—although the Post piece did report that a doctor in Dusseldorf recently went to court to challenge a law that makes it a crime to take a shower after ten in the evening. (I know what you’re saying now. You’re saying, “Get serious!” That means you’re in the denial stage. I suggest that you go to your public library, look up The Washington Post for March 25, 1991, and turn to page A14. Then you can move on to anger.) Next time you’re assured that we have a strong cultural unity with the countries of Western Europe, keep in mind that Germany has laws against taking a shower after 10 P.M.
In Germany, name-clerks routinely turn down names that don’t make it clear whether the child is a girl or a boy, for instance, or names that might sound unfamiliar to the other children at school or names that mean something odd in the language of a foreign country that the child in question will almost certainly never visit.
Let’s say that you want to name your new son Leslie because you have reason to believe that your rich and essentially vicious Uncle Leslie would be so touched by such a gesture that he would leave you a bundle to see little Leslie through college. (I’m using American names because I don’t want to irritate you with unfamiliar German names at a time when this thing has already put you in a bad mood.)
The clerk says absolutely not: Little Leslie could be mistaken for a female. You say that if enough of Uncle Leslie’s boodle is involved, you don’t care if little Leslie could be mistaken for a parking meter. The clerk says no. You appeal to a court. The judge upholds the clerk. You get so mad that you take a shower at ten-fifteen. You get arrested. Now this kid of yours has real problems: He doesn’t have a name and one of his parents is in the slammer.
I don’t mean that I approve of parents giving their children silly names. My views on this matter are on the record. I have stated publicly that naming a child after a store—Tiffany, for instance, or K Mart—is probably unwise. Twenty years ago, I counseled that Sunshine was not a good name for a child, although perhaps perfect for a detergent. I disapproved of the slogan-names favored by Chinese Communists in the fifties because, let’s face it, Assist Korea is no name to have on the playground.
But if Sunshine feels more like a Norbert when he grows up—maybe he thinks Norbert is more appropriate for someone keen on regular promotions in the actuarial department—he can simply change his name. His mother, who changed her name from Maxine to Starglow when she dropped out of college in 1971 to become an apprentice goatherd, can still picture that sweetly dirty little toddler as Sunshine. Should any of this have anything to do with government clerks? Get serious.
1991
Father’s Day Is Gone
Father’s day is gone. It’s over.
Dad was briefly in the clover—
Feeling wise, a valued leader
Who deserved that power weeder.
Cracking wry, a bit like Cos, he
Now reverts—it’s back to Ozzie.
1991
Stage Father
By now, my wife’s policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covers pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies) is pretty well known: She believes that if your child is in a school play and you don’t go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinée for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child. Anyone who has lived for some years in a house where that policy is strictly observed may have fleeting moments of envy toward people who have seen only one or two productions of Our Town.
One evening this spring, though, as we walked into an auditorium and were handed a program filled with the usual jokey résumés of the participants and cheerful ads from well-wishers, it occurred to me that this would be the last opportunity to see one of our children perform in a school theatrical event. That view was based partly on the fact that the child in question is twenty-six years old. She was about to graduate from law school. I was assuming that the JDs slogging through the bar-exam cram course would not decide to break the tedium with, say, a production of Anything Goes.
As I waited for the curtain to go up on the 1995 New York University Law Revue, entitled The Law Rank Redemption, I found myself thinking back on our life as parental playgoers. I realized that I couldn’t recall seeing either of our daughters in one of those classic nursery-school-pageant roles—as an angel or a rabbit or an eggplant. I thought I might be experiencing a failure of memory—another occasion for one of my daughters to say, as gently as possible, “Pop, you’re losing it”—but they have confirmed that their nursery school was undramatic, except on those occasions when a particularly flamboyant hair puller was on one of his rampages.
I do recall seeing one or the other of them as an Indian in Peter Pan and as the judge in Trial by Jury and as Nancy in Oliver! and as the narrator (unpersuasively costumed as a motorcycle tough) in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and as a gondolier in The Gondoliers. We heard their voices in a lot of songs, even if a number of other kids were sometimes singing at the same time. We heard “Dites-moi, pourquoi” sung sweetly and “Don’t Tell Mama” belted out. All in all, we had a pretty good run.
I don’t want to appear to be one of those parents who dozed through the show unless his own kid was in the spotlight. To this day, when I hear “One Singular Sensation,” from A Chorus Line, I can see Julia Greenberg’s little brother, Daniel, doing a slow, almost stately tap-dance interpretation in high-topped, quite tapless sneakers. I’m not even certain what my own girls did in the grade-school talent show at PS 3 that I remember mainly for the performance of the three Korn brothers. One of them worked furiously on a Rubik’s Cube while his older brother accompanied him on the piano. The youngest brother, who must have been six or seven, occasionally held u
p signs that said something like TWO SIDES TO GO or ONE SIDE TO GO. I have always had a weakness for family acts.
I won’t pretend that all school performances were unalloyed joy. We used to go every year to watch our girls tap-dance in a recital that also included gymnastics, and the gymnastics instructor was an earnest man who seemed intent on guarding against the possibility of anyone’s getting through the evening without a thorough understanding of what goes into a simple somersault. He described each demonstration in such excruciating detail that I used to pass the time trying to imagine him helplessly tangled in his own limbs as the result of a simple somersault that had gone wrong:
“Untie me,” he is saying.
“Not until you take an oath of silence,” I reply.
Even so, I came to believe over the years that my wife’s policy on school plays, which sounds extreme, actually makes sense. It used to be that whenever young couples asked me if I had any advice about rearing children—that happens regularly to anyone whose children grow up without doing any serious jail time—I’d say, “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up. Otherwise you’re on your own.” I finally decided, though, that it was okay to remind them that a school play was more important than anything else they might have had scheduled for that evening. School plays were invented partly to give parents an easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities. If they can get off work for the Thursday matinée, I tell them, all the better.
1995
Just How Do You Suppose that Alice Knows?
Just how do you suppose that Alice knows
So much about what’s au courant in clothes?
You wouldn’t really think that she’s the sort
Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin Page 19