Names
Names are powerful things. They reflect and perhaps dictate what you are or what you may become. Often, they are the only things we leave behind, carved into tombstones.
Name #1
I was first named when I was just a reason my mother threw up all the time. She called me Bruce Gustov, sure her baby must be a male to cause her such grief. My father’s Finnish family had been naming the first-born son of each generation “Gustav” in tribute to King Gustav I of Sweden, or so the dubious family history proclaims, because he granted our family land in Finland in the 1500’s. But my mother balked at naming her son Gustav, so my elder brother was called Francis. If you’re going to abandoned a centuries-old tradition, you’d better have a good alternative. But Francis? It was after my uncle Francis, and fair enough, but a poorer choice of a boy’s name in 1940’s America could probably not be found. This was in the day of the popular movie star ”Francis the talking mule”. It was like calling a child a braying ass. To compensate for this lapse of tradition, she agreed to name the second son (me) Gustav.
Name #2
Except I was a girl. I suspect I might have turned my outie into an innie in vitro when I heard a future ringing with schoolyard taunts of Brucey-Goosey and with a name like that I’d pretty much have to be gay which was complicated in the 50’s, so…”It’s a girl!” And so the tradition died when she named me after herself, Laurel Jean. Thank goodness. I could have been Gustavina.
Name #3
Looking into a Quantum Portal
As a little girl, my father would tell me inventive stories about the child who lived in the mirror whose life was exactly opposite of mine (an early lesson in quantum philosophy) My alternative reality name was Aurel Nean and she became another facet of my crystal. Today Aurel Nean is a wealthy slender jet-setter whose affair with George Clooney is the stuff of legend. She lives in a castle and has a houseful of children and grandchildren but never married. She looks about 30. Sigh.
Name #4
A family friend took one look at me and called me L.J. and that name stuck as a pet name used within my family my whole life.
Name #5
My name changed again in high school. I was friends with two other odd ducks. We had offensive nicknames for each other in keeping with girls being so sugar and spice and everything nice. Mine was W.B. LaRue which stood for “Water Buffalo” and the “LaRue” was because I lived on the corner of Early and LaRue streets. LaRue is French and means “the street” so I was named after The Street Street. How is it I didn’t end up homeless or a street-walker? To those two friends, “Elephante Bardass” and “Moose Cragin”, both girls by the way and pretty ones, I remained LaRue all the days of my life while they pretty much managed to live down their charming monikers.
Name #6
My first husband was called Mr. Early and so my name harkened back to that street corner. LaRue and Early. The street corner is still there but I am no longer Mrs. Early. An interesting sidebar to this is how eerily similar the data of my two husbands is.
Apart from these alarming similarities they couldn’t be more different. I think I had the right idea, I just missed the first time. I’ve never been very good with directions. They didn’t look similar though. Where #1 is bald #2 has a braid down his back. #2 is tall #1 not so tall. #1 smoked and played with drugs and alcohol #2 did not. #1 was a hippie #2 was a cop. And of course #1 I divorced, #2 I didn’t.
Name #7
And so I became Mrs. Ennis and have remained so these almost 20 years so far. Both husbands called me Laurel though.
Name #8
When #2 and I were courting, a friend named me “Tender-Love” and we therefore became the saccharine “Tender-Love & Kerr”. And so one of my names is “Tender-Love”.
Name #9
My husband swears there is a force swirling around me. It causes clutter to centre around wherever I spend time. It causes my socks to somehow rotate so the heels end up on the top of my feet. I causes all the blankets on the bed to swirl around me. He has named my inner force. He calls it “Laureolis”.
Name #10
a token of his esteem
Another of my husband’s affectionate names for me is because of the way animals react to me. They love me. I think I got that gift when I was a small girl in Evansville, Indiana. We lived near a rural part of Indiana and our house abutted a peach orchard and a dense wood. My best friend was called Wally. He was 6 to my 5. He brought me presents as a token of his esteem. Toads mostly. Together we would wander the wood and the orchard, because children were safe then and raised free-range.
Deep into the vine dripping wood we found an abandoned log cabin that a settler built. No one else even knew it was there. It was our secret place. One day Wally showed me another secret. We sat on a log and he concentrated for a minute and suddenly animals came scampering toward us. There were raccoons, squirrels, mice, snakes, even a deer. They came and nuzzled him, the snakes twining around his ankles. They all moved happily around him unafraid, letting him pet them and not harming him in any way. It was a truly magical moment in my life. I gazed at him in awe and he just smiled. I think maybe being around Wally on that day in the early part of my life lent me a little bit of his truly astonishing connection with animals. So much so that one day a few years ago I was out in the garden when a baby crow who had a white feather on his tail landed on my shoulder and remained there for about ten minutes. He liked to nuzzle under my hair, probably enjoying the warmth. From that day on my husband called me “The mother of all living things”.
And whatever happened to the magical boy-child of my youth, Wally, the little Dr. Doolittle? Did he become a vet, a zookeeper, an animal protection activist? His parents were a physician and a nurse both working in the field of leukemia research. Yes, Wally died of leukemia at age 7. Not long and not entirely of this world. I’m so grateful he spent some of his brief time with me showing me magical things in the secret vine dripping wood of my youth. Goodbye Wally, and thanks for all the toads.
- Bruce Gustav
- Laurel Jean
- Aurel Neen
- L.J.
- W.B. LaRue
- Mrs. Early
- Mrs. Ennis
- Tender-Love
- Laureolis
- The mother of all living things.
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