What's In a Name?

I woke up thinking about Reince Priebus.  I couldn't get back to sleep, wondering how a baby came to be named "Reince."  I can't imagine looking at a newborn and thinking "He looks like a Reince."

I had to check the internet, at 2 a.m., to learn about Reince Priebus.  Turns out his first name is NOT "Reince" but "Reinhold."  Same question.

The old TV comedy Night Court was directed by Reinhold Wegge and I remember one episode where they discover attorney Dan Fielding's real first name, which was "Reinhold."  Reinhold? the cast asks, incredulously.  (Amazing that I remember that episode!)

These are the things that keep me awake at night.

In this day and age, baby names are all over the map.  We thought "Jerilyn" was weird, but it can't hold a candle to children named Apple (Gwyneth Paltrow), Kal-El (Nicholas Cage thought it would be fun to name his son after Superman's father!), Mowgli (Ashley Simpson, who loves "Jungle Book"), Satchel (Woody Allen ... I wonder if he ever lost the kid in a train station....) and Zuma Nesta Rock (Gwen Stefani). The rapper T.I. named his son YaMajesty.  Can you imagine mom standing on the back porch calling kid to come home for dinner.

Before saddling your child with a name you should always try it out as a "call name."  We learned that after our friends Michele and Richard named their dog "Milhous."  Imagine going around the neighborhood calling 'Hey, Milhous! Here, Milhous."  (This was when Nixon was still in office).  Yeah, we had a weird dog name (Ho Chi Mutt), but we only ever called him Mutt, so it wasn't really the same as Milhous.

In doing research on weird celebrity child names, I discovered that singer Erikya Badu's child, Seven, was named because a clerk typing the birth certificate left off the "t" in Steven.  But they decided to keep his name as Seven.

I still always put at the top of my "names you shouldn't call your kid" list the children of the Seed family who were enrolled in our nursery school.  Huckleberry, Caraway and Sesame.  Nice names, but with Seed?  I once did a Google search on Huckleberry and discovered that apparently he is a professional poker player best known for winning the main event of the 1996 World Series of Poker.  Turns out he's won more than $5 million playing poker. It wouldn't surprise me if Caraway and Sesame married early just to get a new name.

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I found a photo of one of my favorite highway signs on US-50 today.  I have tried several times to get a picture of it, but we're always going too fast, with too much traffic behind us to get a good shot of it.

I also found the back story in "Roadside Distractions."

Why do we let motorists know how far it is to Maryland?  Placerville is about an hour away, and South Lake Tahoe double that, depending on traffic. But why does far-off Ocean City, Maryland merit a mention?

The simple fact is that US-50 paves 3,000-plus miles from Ocean City Maryland to Sacramento California, but there’s more to the story.

In the 1980s John R. Cropper, Jr. worked as the head of statewide highway maintenance for Caltrans. Cropper, now 92, was the man who instigated the sign listing Ocean City, MD as 3073 down the road.

“Years ago, I was back in Ocean City, and they had a sign that said, ‘Sacramento California so many thousand miles’ so I thought, ‘well, that’s a pretty good idea, we should reciprocate,’ so we did," Cropper says.

“I can remember I got a lot of static from Caltrans people because I had been conducting a campaign to get rid of unnecessary signs — and this really was an unnecessary sign,” says Cropper with a wink. “It didn’t mean anything to anybody except people who had some connection — anyway, it’s still there as far as I know.”

The original sign Caltrans put up indicating the terminus of Highway 50. 

This sign ended up costing the state quite a bit of money because it kept getting stolen. According to a 2002 article in the Sacramento Bee, the sign was stolen twice, once in 1999 and then again two years later. Caltrans redesigned the sign to include the distances to Placerville and South Lake Tahoe, making it bigger and harder to throw in the back of a truck. 

On the other side of the continent, we found David Buck, a spokesperson for the Maryland State Highway Administration. Buck’s father, Ed Buck, was a Maryland highway engineer in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was his idea to mark the eastern end of Highway 50 in Ocean City.

“Highway signs obviously are very regulated, in terms of what you can put up there. So when you put something up that’s a little different, or a little unusual like this, people take notice,” says the younger Buck.

“I think it’s neat that my father was part of something that lasted that long," Buck says. "It’s interesting and unique — it’s not standard.”

Ursula

They call it twilight sleep, I think, when it happens in between that awake time when you first go to your sleeping place and the actual sleep that happens after random thoughts flit through your head while trying to get to sleep.   I've had some really weird twilight sleep dreams through the years, where my mind takes over and it goes off on flights of fancy all on its own, sometimes thinking about real things in my life, sometimes true flights of fancy that I had no notion were rolling around in my head. Because I'm busy trying to get to sleep, I have no control over where my thoughts go.

I'm not sure what you call it when this happens in the morning, during that time between deep sleep and fully awake.  

I've started sleeping until about 8:30 in the morning and I'm lovin' it.  Now that doesn't mean 8+ hours of uninterrupted sleep.  That means 2-3 sleeping on the couch, then an hour or more (usually more) awake watching TV and trying to get back to sleep in the recliner, and finally getting to sleep, waking around 5:30-6 and listening to the local news and the Today Show, aware that I'm dozing off and on while "watching."  

It's in those "dozing off" times when I have weird thoughts.

This morning I was thinking about Char's youngest son, Cam (Cameron) and realize that I know his middle name and I knew how he happened to be named Cameron (but not how he happened to get his middle name).  Then I wondered if I remembered all of her kids' middle names.  It's kind of like one of those things that you should know about your best friend, but since the kids are all >50 and pushing 50, it's not something I've had to think about in 50 years.

I started with the oldest.  I knew she was named after Mike's cousin in Belgium and I even remembered her middle name.  But I didn't know how the 2nd daughter got her name and couldn't remember her middle name.  The next daughter was easy because she's my goddaughter, though I didn't remember how they happened to name her either her first name or her middle name.  Tim was easy because one of Char's very best friends at the Newman center was a priest named Tim (in fact, he was the priest who married Walt and me -- we were his first wedding after he was ordained).   I remembered his middle name too, and that brought me back to Cam again.

I told Char about my dream and she filled me in on the name I didn't remember and gave me the story behind how each one happened to be named.   She then shared with me something I hadn't known before, that she herself was apparently named after her mother's favorite childhood doll.  "Not exactly inspiring," she added.

I thought about her being named "Charlotte" and then thought about how the Latin word for "bear" is "ursus" and thought that since she is such a huge fan of the UC Berkeley Bears she should have been named "Ursula" and told her that.  "Sounds good to me. You may call me Ursula from now on," she tells me.

I probably won't, but who knows.  I just may.  That will confuse passengers on our upcoming cruise to France.  Go Bears!

* * *

I falsely maligned our dogs this evening and had a brief moment of panic at the same time.  Walt is off at the opera in San Francisco and the four of us 2- and 4-legged critters are here alone.  I wait to watch the evening shows (mostly Jeopardy) until Walt gets home so we can watch them together, so I decided to watch a movie instead.   I got into the recliner, kicked off my Birkenstocks, and settled in to watch the movie. The dogs paced in and out of the house during the last half hour or so because it was getting to be dinner time and I wasn't getting up to feed them instantly.

When the movie ended, I got out of the chair and there was only one shoe.  I looked under the chair, on either side of the chair and all over the family room.  The dogs are not chewers and I never have problem leaving anything on the floor (other than a plastic waterbottle) because I know that they won't run off with it.  But the shoe wasn't anywhere.  I pushed the chair forward and it wasn't under the chair either.

I went outside in the fading light trying to find it before it got completely dark.  But no shoe.  I checked the living room, the couch (where the bottles they carry out of the family room end up) and everywhere they might have taken the shoe.  I asked them many times what they had done with my shoe, but nobody talked.

I finally lifted the chair up to see better under it.  Still, the shoe was not under the chair, but it looked a little odd under the folded up footrest and when I examined further, the shoe had gotten folded up when I went to get up and there it was.  Whew.

I wear my Birkenstocks every day and they are wearing out badly, after about 20 years, and I keep meaning to get a new pair, but just have never done it.   No time tomorrow because I'm having lunch with Ursula and her cousin Susan (of Logos) and won't have time to get downtown to shop.  But definitely on Thursday morning I need to get a replacement pair of Birkenstocks, just in case I ever lose one again.  I'll keep these ratty old friends in the closet in case I ever lose a shoe again.

But the dogs are off the hook.  They were good dogs after all.

Day 71:  Brianna is getting more like Uncle Ned every day