What's in a name?

This week I found two long lost cousins that I haven’t seen for over 40 years. It’s a long story. In so doing, long lost Cal wrote to me jokingly calling me Danny, as that was what folks called me when we last knew each other.

This mind you was way back in the last century during, I believe the Kennedy or Johnson administration, before color television and when phones were nailed to walls. When kids actually walked to school and we had air raid drills and hid beneath our desks and looked at the girls’ underwear. Duck and cover was great fun for a kid with a touch of ADD. When the air raid sirens went off, we all jumped under our desks as two or three monitors pulled the huge big curtains closed. It was fun to see the girl's underwear in the desk in front of you, even though the teacher yelled at us to keep our heads down and eyes closed... I remember one time a girl named Iris started to cry, and someone else asked the teacher if we were all going to die.

When the all clear signal went off, and the curtains were opened, I think she was visibly shaken, but tried to calm us down by saying that the school district had installed special “magic windows” over the weekend, and that if there was an explosion, they would blow out not in, and that was why we had these curtains all lined in lead to protect all the children in Steindorf Elementary School... I look back as an adult and think now, that she was really great. As she, as well had to have been scared, and worried about her own kids and family, and if it was the big one or not…

But, really, I can’t stand being called Danny… let me tell you why.

4^th grade was a big deal in San José, you learned to do long division and made models of missions. Little did I know it was going to be momentous for an other reason…

When I was in 4^th grade I remember working up the guts to ask Mrs. Moore, who was as large and intimidating as any teacher could be to a squeaky little kid who had more energy in him than was possible for a 4^th grader at the time, to ask her to stop calling him Danny.

One day, while everyone was working, and Mrs. Moore was in the back of the room by the water fountain, I got up from my desk, walked back to the water fountain, and took a long drink (this no doubt began my long and storied career in the study of liquid fortification… but I digress), and I turned to her.

Suddenly she seemed well over 200 feet tall, as she stood towering over me with enormous bosoms that loomed over me like glacier point from Camp Curry, with hands on her hips, and asked me,

“Danny is there something you want to ask me?”

“Yes, mam”, I replied in my squeaky 10 year old voice, “I wish you would not call me Danny anymore”.

She looked at me thru her pointy glasses, and replied,

“Well then, what shall we call you?”

Gulping I replied, “My name is Dan”.

Thereby she turned to the rest of the class, and clapped her hands loudly, and declared,

“Class, we now have a NEW student, his name is Dan”.

I shrunk inside, no doubt turned bright red.

Whereby they all looked at me and my arch enemy by the name of Les broke out in a huge evil smile, and I shrunk to the size of a pea. When I got back to my desk, he began a whispering chant,

“Danny Fanny... Danny Fanny… “

Now, I want to say that I jumped out of my seat and pounded the crap out of him, but by then I was beginning my intellectual pursuits, and being deeply intrigued by the mysteries of solving a page full of long-division problems, turned to him and told him to shut up, which of course Mrs. Moore who had been teaching for over 300 years and was possessed with super human hearing or something, overheard, and gave me a demerit.

Later, after years of work in Latin America, I decided to use my real name, Daniel… but it doesn’t really matter, just don’t call me late to lunch (or Danny, for that matter).