On Nomenclature

My Uncle David. Well, technically my great-uncle David, but we've never been a family terribly loyal to the traditional familial naming structure. My entire life I knew this man as Uncle David, my paternal grandmother's brother. I had always assumed that he knew himself as David his entire life as well.

In going through an old family album, I came across this picture of Uncle David as a young man. It came with this caption:

Your great-uncle David. He lives in San Francisco and you will see a lot of him in the next few yeras. He was born Mack Ladd Faulkner...was always known as "Buddy" but legally changed his name to "David" when he was older.

Uncle David was actually Uncle Buddy who was actually Uncle Mack Ladd? An odd prospect, but not one that rocked me to my core. But it had piqued my interest.

I called my grandmother and asked her when it was that Uncle David had changed his name. She did not remember what I was talking about. More specifically, she remembered that people called him Buddy, but she did not remember what his name had been before that.

What a sucess! My mind spins thinking of what such a transformation would entail. First, deciding to change your name. The implications of it! Imagine having to have that conversation with all the people in your life. Your family. Your friends. Your co-workers. Your neighbors. Then there are all the people you'd have to inform for purely legal reasons. The HR lady at your office. Social security office. Insurance agents. DMV. How often you would have to give your explanation speech, how rehearsed it would start to sound before you had even made it part way through your list.

"Hey there, Mack! What'd you do this weekend?"

"Yeah, about that. My name is David now. If you could please start calling me David, I would really appreciate it."

"What?"

"I have legally changed my name, and I would appreciate it if you called me David from now on."

And that's only for the people you think of giving the speech to. Think of all the incidental explanations you would have to give! All those people who reach out to us from our pasts, those people we run into at coffeeshops, at random get togethers. I imagine my Uncle David at a business lunch, after he had been David for years, and having some past acquaintance come up to the table, slapping a hello on the back to his old friend Buddy. By then, Uncle David's business associates might not have ever known him as anything else. How awkward must that have been? Not only the explanation to his old friend, but then a revamped explanation to his current friends.

And how does one go about choosing a new name? I've always considered the act of naming a child to be an incredible responsibility. But choosing a name for yourself? If you're named Mack Ladd, that burden lies with your parents. But if you rename yourself, the responsibility for that act of nomenclature is yours alone.

It seems like such a simple act, going by a different name. But the act of changing your name implies a whole series of transformations. When you think of yourself, which name do you think? When you dream, in that way that dreams have no coherent sense of time, by what name do you go when your grandmother appears to you on your seventhieth birthday? How thoroughly can that act of transformation penetrate? Into your memories? Into your daydreams? Into your future?

When my uncle dreamed, did he dream he was Mack or Buddy or David? Did it vary? When he chided himself for a poor choice, how did he call himself? It must be exhausting, relearning to turn your head when a name is called, filling out forms, creating your signature.

What a tremendous act of will. I wonder, have I the strength of will to be so transformed?