What’s in a Name?

Virgin

My name is Elizabeth, but I grew up as Lisa (a common name at the time due to the popularity of actress Lisa Gaye). At any rate, some folks spell Elizabeth, "Elisabeth," so I was Lisa . . . and MAN were there a lot of us. In one of my high school English classes there were six Lisa's, and in college, there were even more! Finally I got tired of it. I was tired of being part of a crowd.

I didn't really feel like a Lisa, either. I liked the name all right; it’s a pretty name. But I thought of Lisa's as "sweet" and "good", and at the time I wasn’t particularly interested in either one of those things. I wanted to grow up--not worry so much about other people, be more straight-forward, embrace my edgier self, figure out who I really was (I’m still working on it). So I “changed” my name.

Lover

“I’m Liz,” I said at parties. “I’m going by Liz, now,” I told old friends. And soon I was her. I was Liz. I turned when people said the name; I wrote it on my college papers; I felt it when my lovers whispered it in bed.

For years I’ve been Liz: Liz graduated college; Liz got married; Liz bore children; Liz went to graduate school, got a job, bought a house, paid bills; Liz is going gray. 

Mother

But what happened to Lisa? Where did she go, that little girl, that adolescent, that young woman I once was, for so many years? I still answer to the name; I still look up when I hear someone say “Lisa” in a crowd. And when my aunt and uncle--those living links to the long-ago "me"--call me by that name, it’s sweet. It touches me. I’m still her to them . . . and to myself in that moment. How odd! And even more surprisingly, when I hear my old name coming from the people I love, and they mean me, and something in me answers them--something long-ago and real and deep--I feel a bit sad, maybe regretful even, that I just dumped Lisa off on a street corner somewhere in Ann Arbor and said, “Don’t wait for me.” Didn’t I have some responsibility for her? Shouldn’t I have given her a little warning?

But, well, Liz wasn’t as nice as Lisa, right? Not as thoughtful? She didn't care more about other people than about herself like Lisa did. At least she didn’t want to. Liz wanted to be free: to be a writer, a poet, an artist, a wanderer, a lover, a singer, a seeker, a seer. Liz was trying to leave Lisa behind.

We can’t, though, can we? We can’t leave ourselves behind, not 

Queen

any part of us. We are who we are because of all that we have been. And my parents were smart. They gave me a name that could be a hundred selves--Bess and Betsy, Els and Elspeth, Betty and Beth; Eliza and Ellie, Bet and Tibby, Lisa and Liz. And this is good thing for a restless chameleon like me, somebody who enjoys trying on all the perspectives, writing all the characters, listening to everyone’s stories, leaving nothing out. Being a million shades of me.

I was speaking with an old friend on the phone the other day. He asked me how I was. I said I was doing OK, but I was trying to figure out how to “come out of the closet” so to speak, and be who I really am now that I’m middle-aged.  

He said, “You’ve been trying to do that for 25 years!” We both laughed; because it’s true.

I added, “Well, It’s a really long closet, and I have to try on every outfit from here to the door to figure which me is going to open it!”

“Maybe,” he said, “it would be better if we just came in?” And there was a pause, “But then, we might never get out again.”

I think that’s my fear, actually, that the whole of me--Elizabeth, that girl with a raft of possible selves (with all of their ideas and enthusiasms and fears and perspectives and needs)--might gobble you up, you people I love. Better to keep it short: Liz. Better to make it sweet: Lisa.

The people who love me don’t seem to be buying it, though. These days my closest friends are starting to call me “Lizzie.” I’ve noticed it; they’re calling me by the pet name my mother, and father, and grandparents used for me in that long-ago time when my everyday name was Lisa. I don’t know exactly when “Liz” started morphing to “Lizzie”--I didn’t tell anyone to use it--but I guess I can see why. They know me.  Lizzie is more vulnerable, less edgy, a bit (can I say it?) sweeter--more (if I’m honest) true of me. Am I really Liz with her razor-sharp “z” pulled at the ready? Am I that straight-ahead sure that I am right? I’m a Liz who keeps her “Z” tucked up within her unless she really needs it, a person who begins with the “L“ of Love--has a temper tantrum of resistance in the middle of things, waving that “Z” around--and ends with the “ie” of “cutie“ and “sweetie” and “sorry” : a Lizzie.

So who’s coming out? I’ll keep my public Liz; she’s the one I introduce myself as.  I publish as Elizabeth (it’s a beautiful, classic name, with a great, big closet of possible selves). My aunt and uncle will remind me of the Lisa I still hold inside. And when my friends call me LIzzie, well, I won’t correct them.

Me?

Footnote:

The great and powerful Wikipedia says that “A hypocorism (/haɪˈpɒkərɪzəm/; from Greek ὑποκορίζεσθαι hypokorizesthai, "to use child-talk"[1]) is a shorter or diminutive form of a word or given name, for example, when used in more intimate situations as a nickname or term of endearment. Also known as pet name or calling name. However, shortening of names is certainly not exclusive to terms of affection, indeed in many cases a shortened name can also be attributed to expressions of hatred, it's a grey area.”

Cardinal Truth

 (picture source: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology )

As I sat on our little back porch last night conversing with an old friend about love, and loss, and the beautiful and sad world we live in, a brilliant male cardinal swooped underneath the grapevines that have wrapped around the corner there to create a cool, green bower. He landed not more than five feet from away, twitching his brilliant tail, his crest rising and falling as he turned his eye to look at me. What a beauty, with his orange beak and crimson feathers! He took me in; then off he flew.

Not more than a moment later, I saw him with a female in the bushes near to the house. She had the same bright beak, but was a muted, salmon-color, just as lovely but more subtle, and she was shy. The male flew to the porch rail several times, then back to the bushes while the female looked on. Each time he joined her they seemed to confer, though they didn’t make any sound that I could hear, and then suddenly, all at once, they both flew into the vines above me. When I looked up I saw what this was all about: They had built a small nest high up in the grape vines near the roof of the porch. It was right above where I was sitting and I hadn’t seen it! Poor things; there I was, all big and threatening, just where they needed to be. I didn’t go though; I sat still to watch.

Their nest is quite different from the one the robins built at the other end of the porch where earlier in the summer we watched four babies hatch, feed, grow, and fly. This cardinals’ nest is made of stiffer stuff, and it is lacy, so much so that I could see the little bodies of the baby birds (I think there are two) right through the twigs, and even a flash of a pink mouth. For the next 10 minutes I sat there as the parents--red and salmon, bright and subtle--came and went, came and went, tending and feeding their young in a fluster of parental concern, both of them often bending over the nest together.

One of my precious Buddhist teachers, Khenpo Palden Sherab, once said, “The world is always speaking to you in metaphor. But you have to pay attention,” and another great teacher, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, said, “You can even learn the Dharma from nature, from the flight of a bird.”  On a day of contemplating death, discovering this unexpected new life above me, hidden in the sheltering leaves, was a small, sweet blessing and a teaching:  hidden in joy is suffering, and in suffering joy; hidden in life, death, and in death, life; hidden in samsara is nirvana, and in nirvana, samsara. Actually there is no difference between the two. There is only this world, right here, but it can be experienced in two very different ways.

How to Write an Essay (If you're me)

First you resist. And Agonize. And hope the essay will go away if you ignore it. You clean your house, and sort the mail, and eye the essay from across the room, obliquely, hoping it won’t notice you there if you whistle and water the plants.

And you wait. You wait until the last minute. You wait until it is the day before the essay is due, and then you panic. You panic and yell at your dog, at your husband, at your kids. You walk around the house banging cupboards and cleaning very loudly. It is someone else’s fault that this essay is not done: It is your teacher’s fault who assigned you this stupid essay in the first place; It is your kids’ fault because they are too noisy and so you can’t even hear yourself think, let alone write a stupid essay; It is the stupid dog’s fault because he barfed on the rug and you had to clean it up instead of writing this stupid essay. And it is definitely your stupid husband’s fault whose stinky, dirty socks you have to waste all your time picking up instead of writing this, stupid, stupid essay!! You have to say all of this out loud, VERY loud, to write an essay. If you have a lot of self-control, you wait until no one is home to begin (Come on kids, let’s go to the park. Mommy has to write an essay.). The door slams shut. “Shit. Piss. Fuck!” You stomp around hollering at the top of your lungs, “I am not going to write this essay! I don’t have to write this essay! No one can make me write this essay! I hate this class; I hate this teacher; I hate my WHOLE STUPID LIFE! 

When you are done yelling and banging and stomping, and are all good and tired out, you flump yourself into the couch and sit there breathing hard with your arms crossed. You swing your foot wildly. You imagine ways to escape. You imagine a tragedy that will save you-- a hurricane, an accident, a fire, a flood. You imagine hitting the highway, “I’m out of here,” and the note you will leave. You imagine buying a yellow school bus and filling it with spider plants, and jars of dried beans and pasta, and putting in a wooden floor, and a hammock, and a tiny woodstove, and traveling to New Mexico in it where you will live like a gypsy selling jewelry and reading astrology charts…and where you meet a man with kind eyes who plays a wooden flute, and you get pregnant with him and forget your other children, and your husband--but not your essay—though you can’t write it, of course, because you are nursing and smoking pot and sleeping out under the cold, white desert stars. Or you drive to California, and you stand in the waves, and you learn to surf, and you live on fish, and Tangueray, and oranges, and you never get old.

Now, you have wasted an hour. Now you have wasted a week and an hour. You eyeball the clock. You chew the side of your thumb. You count out how many hours are left before your class: 11 and three quarters. You can do this, you think to yourself. You have done this before. 

You get up and put the coffee on. Then you climb to the attic with your cup, and you find the box with your yearbooks, and the one with your diplomas, and the one of all your school papers from sixth grade on, and you haul them all out of there and look at them. Papers from high school and middle school spread out around you with their 85’s and 92’s and 78’s ("Lisa, Why did you turn in a DRAFT as your final revision? Use more care!”) These are supposed to give you courage, prove your competence, give you ideas. Maybe you secretly hope that you will find a paper you’ve already written on this topic and somehow forgotten--a brilliant paper from that one class you had—what was it called?— the teacher who said that you should be a writer? A paper that you never turned it in for credit, but will be there near the bottom of the box all ready for you. 

You have wasted two hours. Your knees ache. Your back hurts. Your coffee is stone cold. You climb down from the attic, warm up the coffee, and begin:

“How to Write an Essay

The most important part of a well-crafted essay is…..”

And then you stop. What is the most important part? What is it supposed to be, anyway? You remember a little about “thesis” and about the importance of having an “outline,” but isn’t there a “body paragraph” something or other – more than one of them—which makes you think of paragraphs with legs coming out the bottom. How are you supposed to write an essay if you can’t remember the rules? Now you are having a little bout of hopeless self-loathing: you are clearly stupid, and you can’t write and you never could write, and you know nothing whatsoever about grammar or punctuation, and you wouldn’t know an adverbial clause if he jumped off his sleigh and handed you an nicely packaged “LY” word from his big red bag. Sooooo…. you pour yourself a glass of wine at three-thirty in the afternoon and sit in the winter sunlight feeling like you’ve wasted your life.

Your family comes home and you lie to them. You say brightly, “I’m almost finished.” You play cards with your children. You mop the kitchen floor in penance, then you take a hot bath and stay up late goofing around on Facebook.

* * * * *

In the morning, you are desperate, repentant, and ready to write. An hour and a half before class, you open up a Word document and start typing. You dive in like an Olympian. Your heart pounds. Your fingers race. It’s you against the clock, but you are in the groove now, and the words flow out of you like out of some font of language, like you were made to do only this in life—to write with passion and power and grace. You are a word machine, you are a Craft-Mastah. Caffeine and a deadline are your best friends.

Five minutes before class you hit “print”—no spell-check, no proofread, no edit, no draft—It’s just you on your snowboard, taking the jump: there is one moment of flight, then you land it, or you don’t. It’s just you at half-court at the end of the game with the score tied: the ball has left your hand in a perfect arc, and the buzzer is sounding: the ball will or it won’t go in.

As you jam the pages of your essay into your bag and grab your coat, racing for the car (hoping there’s gas and that there isn’t a wide-load going up East), you vow to yourself, once again, that next time you have to write an essay, you’re going to start writing early . . . ..