What’s in a Name 

Yesterday, I was thinking of my cousins and their names. My aunt and uncle Cosey and Clyde Brothers had seven children. Because Clyde and Cosey each had five letters in their names, they decided to name each of their children with names that had five letters as well. The choices of names started with Clyde Jr., then came David. Wayne, Linda, Ellen, and Darla were born. I purposefully overlooked one name and that was the name that caused confused my aunt Cosey.

Cosey shared with my mom that she liked the name Deborah, but Deborah had more than the “allowed” five letters. After they talked, my mom Sybil Beck suggested an alternative spelling. That is how Debra brothers got her name.

I know that I’ve shared this story before, but decided that it fit into this theme, so I am including it here. The incident occurred when I was a corpsman in the United States Navy. A pregnant woman came into the hospital in Keflavik, Iceland with pre-eclampsia. Pre-eclampsia is a condition that causes a pregnant mother’s blood pressure to rise dangerously. It can be life threatening to both the mother and the unborn infant. Her condition caused her to be in and out of the hospital frequently, because her abdomen was so large, we would tease her about having twins. She would tell us that her doctor assured her that there was only had one child inside. This was before ultrasounds machines and could be judged by listening for heartbeats with a fetascope.

When she came in, she delivered a set of twin girls on an off shift. The next morning, I went into her room intent on teasing her about actually delivering twins. When I entered her room, my plans shifted immediately. She was crying. I asked why she was she was crying. She explained that she had the name Alice picked out if she had a daughter and now she had two she was afraid, “If I name one of them Alice I think I will love her more than the other.”

I’m not known as a person who is at a loss for words or for ideas, off the top of my head I immediately suggested, “Why not name them with names close to Alice, but not really Alice, like Allison and Alicia?” So I got to name a set of twins and I was invited to their home to babysit them the first time their parents went on a date, post-delivery.