The Name Game

Susannah

Please allow me to introduce myself

Without further ado, please allow me to introduce myself. Rasheed Hooda

Doesn’t that sound like a polite, straightforward greeting? It is a courteous asking, no imposition, no making you listen, from a kind man who reminds me of Mr. Rogers if Fred Rogers had travelled the highways and byways.

It’s not his fault that a certain individual lets her mind fly back to her teenage years and her fondness for a renegade rock group.

Please allow me to introduce myself …… Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil,”

His thinking of a polite introduction and my thinking of Sympathy for the Devil may illustrate the difference between us.

Oh well, enough about Rasheed Hooda and on to me, me, me.

I have set one rule for myself in playing this name game. I will choose, from my admittedly biased perch, the aptest one-word description that corresponds to the letters of my first name, being neither unduly flattering nor unwarrantedly insulting.

Stubborn…….. I hesitated over this. Wouldn't it be fun to start with smart? That would not stray too far from the truth. You know how families are. They sort you out and label you, stick you in a box and then toss you on the shelf. My tag was the smart one; one sister was the pretty one, and the other sister was the sweet one. It wasn't fair or realistic. None of us were ugly, and none of us were dumb. I might not have been sweet, but I could be kind. But that's family for you.

Still, I heard ten times as many “you are so stubborn” than I did “you’re so smart.” Often it was decorated with “stubborn as a mule” because that conveyed a delightful combination of derision and disapproval. I didn't take it that way, though. The only mule I knew was tall and powerful and the epitome of good sense.

My two sisters and I would have someone put all three of us on that mule’s broad back and we would ride around the yard, under the illusion that worn piece of rope was controlling him. When the mule decided it was time to stop, he would head for the low-hanging branch of the mimosa tree next to the house, slowly walk under it and sweep us gently to the ground.

As a child I gladly claimed stubbornness, thinking it meant determination and perseverance. Years later I felt vindicated, with a sense of I told you so satisfaction, when grit became a desirable character trait.

Useful……. I wanted to say unusual or unique because who doesn’t want to be special? But if I'm honest, useful is a better fit. A technician I worked with years ago, who hoped to become a pharmacist, said: “I don’t want to be like you because you work too hard and you want things done right all the time, but I want a partner like you because you take care of all the stuff no one else wants to do.” That pretty well sums up my forty-plus years working as a pharmacist.

Smart…….Okay, now I can go for smart. But what is smart, really? Is it IQ or grades in school? On those counts, I can qualify, but the older I get, the more shallow that seems.

My best buddy, Merriam-Webster Dictionary also defines smart, in informal usage, as: rude or impolite in a bold and disrespectful way: example: Don’t get smart with me.

I qualified on that count too when I was young, but I have become more and more attached to politeness over the years. Being courteous is such civilized behavior.

Angry…….I had a dreadful temper. My first-grade teacher said, “when those black eyebrows go down and those black eyes start flashing, I want to cry. I never saw a child with such an awful temper.” I’ve worked on learning restraint over the years, but my family thinks it’s hilarious when I congratulate myself on how much I have mellowed. I never punched down or even level though. I only got that blazingly angry at someone bigger, stronger, or more “important” than me.

Neat ……. I think because my inner life is so chaotic, with crazy dreams and wandering thoughts, I like for the outer world to be orderly. I don’t mean everything ramrod straight, lined up to attention, ready to salute. Just that everything has its own place and be in it when not actually in use. My husband can produce an unbelievable amount of work from an office that hovers between the Slough of Despond and the local landfill. But I cannot.

Nifty…….. Oh goodness, another N, how annoying. At first, I thought of nifty as a last resort, an act of desperation choice as very few adjectives beginning with N seemed applicable. But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to fit. I’m not a master of anything but I can do a lot of things pretty well, cooking, gardening, setting up all the technical stuff in our home, selling, negotiating, riding a horse, a lot of this and that.

Annoying…….And another A. These double letters are annoying. That was a word that I heard from several bosses during the misery of annual evaluations. They could rarely find fault with my performance or my results, but they went to town picking apart who I was. At many of the places I worked, the managers had personality evaluations so we could be a “more effective team.” Upper management just wanted to know how best to manipulate us. My evaluation always said I was self-motivated, responsive to neither the carrot nor the stick. It did not matter that I wanted to work hard and do well. It was better to do a poorer job and dangle like a puppet on the boss’s string. Every year for four years, at the annual scorecard travesty, one administrator said I was annoying. He much preferred managers who responded to flattery and threat. He was lucky that the hospital wasn’t one that had the managers rate the administrator. He would have been incensed if he had seen what I thought of him.

Headstrong……. it could have been helpful, but that's too much like useful. Headstrong resembles stubborn in insisting on having one’s own way, but there are distinct differences. Stubborn is like rock, holding its ground while headstrong is like wind, rushing forth. My mother said I was born saying “can do it myself”, determined to do everything for myself and in my own way. I have no interest in ruling anyone else’s actions, but I resist being ruled. These song lyrics are a good approximation of how I feel.

Back off, I’ll take you on Headstrong to take on anyone I know that you are wrong…….Trapt

Thank goodness my name is not as long as this man.

Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr. (a.k.a. Hubert Wolfstern, Hubert B. Wolfe + 988 Sr., Hubert Blaine Wolfe+585 Sr., and Hubert Blaine Wolfe+590 Sr., among others) is the abbreviated name of a German-born American typesetter who has held the record for the longest personal name ever used…..Wikipedia

Rasheed Hooda ended his story with these words.

Now it’s your turn.

If that’s not an open invitation, I never saw one.

It started me on the path to my story, using the letters of my first name. It was a long and wandering road.

I got to know the acronym outline, a marvelous organizational tool in this story by Tim Maudlin. I had used acronyms before, but not for such a worthy purpose.

I read the story about Henery X (long) and got distracted and designed a T-shirt for my husband on Canva. Then there were challenges and prompts and my own random explorations.

I really enjoyed exploring my way into this one that combined Abecedarian with the “joys” of reuniting with classmates.

Then today I read this where Timothy Key is “doing a weekly roundup of the challenges I took on along with my responses.”

In it, I read this story and remembered I wanted to play the name game.

So play the name game I did.