My Name

Secretly, my name is Happy.  Not Happy Rockefeller although I wouldn’t mind the money.  My name is candy canes and jelly beans, the riotous colors of autumn, the swirl of a psychedelic poster.  It is not subdued, brown, beige or depressed.  My name is Cuba, indulging in complimentary colors, not matching tones.  It is the pink of cotton candy and red hearts, Fiestaware and a lemony drink with an umbrella found perched on a barstool in the middle of a blue pool in Cancun.  My name is not the East Coast but the alleyways of San Francisco with brash urban art, the sound of a belly laugh, a pulsing of the air that refuses to cease and desist.  It is not serene but the braying sound of the seals in Fisherman’s Wharf.  It is not the name I was given on a dark, January morning into a world that still had Harry Truman as president.    I was deposited into a button-down, dreary, Cold-War world of steam heated apartments, frozen exteriors, dark skies, the silence of snow and a mother who went crazy.  I was named for a biblical figure, a woman of justice and majesty and it might have been enough until it  became a diminutive, the brand name of a small donut.  Little Debbie.  I was born with three short, ugly names.  A middle name that was a common tag of its time, a bowing to the convention of having one at all, innocuous and blending in with the first, not taking away its thunder, a bridge to be skipped over or forgotten.  The last name a  non-euphonious translation, a hatchet job at Ellis Island.  A name not in the language I speak.  One that had no flowing rivers, no hillocks, no resting places, no artisan occupations, no village as a reference.  An unlikey combination of consonants, a reminder that we were immigrants.   Over time, my new last name has added more vowels to round it out on the tongue, to drive it deeper down the throat, closer to the heart, away from the upper palate of Teutonic inflection, to sunny Mexico, to doors painted in blazing blues, to the colors of the rainbow.  My made-up name has migrated to lands with sunny plazas and ice cream vendors selling neon-colored flavors.  I love the Hispanic way of naming, a full succession of names denoting relations and ancestor lines, a seemingly endless parade of names, a heralding of a new person to carry on.  Secretly, my name is Happy now, happy to be old, happy to be finished with the seriousness of it all, happy to let go of everything that doesn’t please me, happy to find the world in its daily sounds, smells and images.  Happy I have survived intact.