The tragedy of the middle name

Yesterday was my 58th birthday. I had a lovely day. Spring in Seattle is long and mild, with temperatures in the high 40s to the low 60s. Right now, daffodils,hyacinths, grape hyacinths, and the last of the big crocuses are blooming on the ground, with cherry trees overhead, and quince, gooseberry, clematis armandii, and daphne odorata filling the space in between. The air smells great, and I'm not allergic to any of the things that make it smell great*. Glenn and I took two neighbhorhood walks yesterday and ate lunch at our neighbhorhood Indian restaurant. Later, I took another walk with Vonda, so over all I felt the smug virtue of the person who has had a reasonable amount of exercise.

In the afternoon, I baked wheat-free lemon bars to take to my evening Clarion West meeting (I am a person who volunteers slightly too much, so I have another Clarion West meeting this evening. Last week, I had two Clarion West database-related events, neither of which was, strictly speaking, a Clarion West meeting. Next week, I have no Clarion West meetings or events scheduled, so I may get a whole lot of Clarion West database and fundraising infrastructure work done). The meeting ran on time, got through all its scheduled work, and was overall useful, a thing which can't always be said about meetings.

The lemon bars had no structural integrity, a frequent problem with wheat-free baking, but they tasted great and filled the dietary niche of birthday cake, though without the tiny candles, to which I am also allergic. Today, after a night in the fridge, their structural integrity is greatly improved.

But I was going to talk about the tragedy of the middle name. Parents! Especially prospective parents, who have not yet named their yet-to-be-born children! Be sure to give your child as a first name the name by which you intend to call that child. Do not, I beg of you, do not give your child two names and then call the child by the second name. If you name your child Xaphod Beeblebrox Jones, call your child Xaphod, not Beeblebrox.

In the carefree days of my youth, it was not a big deal that I was always addressed by a nickname for my middle name. A moment of correcting the teacher on the first day of school, a quick note on the class roster, and everything was fine for the whole school year. I never used that first name for anything. Most of the time, I just used it as an initial, or left it off altogether, as I got jobs, applied for credit, paid bills, filed taxes under the name I use for formal purposes, Kathryn Schaefer. In those days, in the US, your name could be whatever you said it was, as long as you weren't trying to defraud other people or do some other criminal thing. At the time, of course, we didn't know we were living in the olden days.

It's still not a big deal, not at all, except when I want to buy a plane ticket, use that plane ticket, check my social security record, buy or sell stock or real estate, open a bank account, vote, or register for practically anything legal. Everything is computerized, and all the computer records and forms assume that the name that matters is the first name. Even when there is room to enter the whole name, the middle name is subsequently abbreviate to one letter.

This is a common problem in my family. My mother, Yvonne, must travel under her first name pseudonym of Marian. My brother Duncan doesn't answer to Lawrence, but that's what TSA calls him. My father-in-law, Glenn the elder, does not rejoice in his secret first name of Warren. Glenn's niece, Alexis, shows an ID that says Margaret. Of the five of us, only Alexis chose to go by her middle name. The parents of the other four all gave us first names that they never, never intended to use for any purpose whatsoever. They just put the names in that order because they thought they sounded better that way.

If names sound better in a particular order, but that sequence is almost never uttered, do they really sound better?

I've talked about this problem for years. I've hesitated to go ahead and change my legal name to the name I use in normal life for a number of reasons, chief among them being the pain in the butt nature of doing so. I may have reached the point where I'm ready to deal with the pain later this year. Dealing with the mismatch between my names costs me a ridiculous amount of time and aggravation.

But hey! You prospective parents! It's not too late for your kids. Head off this tragedy now by putting the name you'll use first on the birth certificate. Let your kids blame you for some other parenting error.

* Unfortunately, I am allergic to a large number of the things that don't have much effect on the way the air smells in spring but are in that air anyway: birch pollen, alder pollen, maple pollen, pine pollen. They aren't as bad as the pollens that show up in the summer, when every tiny grass feels free to get out and try to reproduce in my nostrils.