{"id":236,"date":"2010-08-05T16:43:16","date_gmt":"2010-08-05T23:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=236"},"modified":"2020-12-11T16:53:21","modified_gmt":"2020-12-11T23:53:21","slug":"whats-in-a-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/236","title":{"rendered":"What’s In A Name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(This essay was written for The Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2010)<\/p>\n

\u201cFate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.\u201d <\/em>Oliver Wendell Holmes<\/em><\/p>\n

As I answer the ringing phone, I am distracted by my cat chasing his tail and do not hear the brief telltale silence presaging a stranger seeking money. \u201cHello. This is Doralinda Kayamunga of the NRA calling for Mr. Tom Walsmar.\u201d I hang up, though in retrospect I wish I\u2019d thought to ask Doralinda how she got Tom from Todd and Walsmar from Walton.<\/p>\n

My childhood friends delighted in calling me Toad Walnut, and did so with such frequency that their teasing ceased to rankle. Please note: their playful distortion of my name was intentional, whereas the thousand and one subsequent manglings of Todd and Walton result, as far as I can tell, from endemic dyslexia. I have been called Tom, Toby, Tad, Ted, Tony, Don, Rod, and Scott hundreds of times in my life, usually in combination with Watson, Walters, Weldon, Waldon, Walsmar, Wilson, Welton, Waters, Waldo, and most recently Watton.<\/p>\n

For goodness sake, my name is not Jascha Heifetz or Ubaldo Jimenez or Ilgaukus Christianoosman. In England, Walton is as common as Smith. My surname derives from Walled Town, and in medieval England nearly all towns were walled towns. In those long ago days, a person might be known as Roderick of Walled Town or Sylvia of Walled Town, and over the ensuing centuries, William of Walled Town became Bill Walton of UCLA and the Portland Trailblazers.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that you, at one time or another, have had your name and\/or names misread and mis-said, but I have yet to meet anyone with a name as simple and straightforward as mine who experiences such persistent moniker mishandling. My wife, Marcia Sloane, her first name frequently spelled Marsha by even her close friends, and her last name often presented minus the E at the end, posits that the very simplicity of Todd Walton is the cause of people mistaking my name (s) for others. She has yet to convincingly explain why simplicity breeds confusion, and in support of my theory of rampant dyslexia I remind her that when she recently gave a talk at the Unitarian, both the Beacon and the Advocate referred to her as Marika Solace.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most egregious distortion of my first name came in 1967 at the outset of my first year of college at brand new UC Santa Cruz. Dazed and confused, I dutifully followed the orders in my freshman orientation packet and went to consult with the advisor assigned to me, a nationally renowned sociologist I shall not name. This mean little man would soon be locally renowned as a middle-aged sex fiend preying on gullible undergrad females. To that end, he made sure only females landed on his list of advisees. So why was I on his list? Because some administrative dweeb transcribed my name Todi, and this horny old fart took the misspelling to be an Italian (or possibly Finnish) girl\u2019s name. Needless to say, he was extremely displeased when a sweaty boy and not some svelte female darkened his door. After a brief and icky meeting, he grimly suggested I find other counsel. Todi, indeed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd we were angry and poor and happy, \u2028and proud of seeing our names in print.\u2028\u201d G.K. Chesterton<\/em><\/p>\n

When I published my first novel Inside Moves<\/em>, I did what all first-time authors do; I visited myriad bookstores to see if they were carrying my book. In several of these stores, my book was shelved in the hobby section, the resident geniuses having read the title as Inside Movies<\/em>. When the book and subsequent film provided me with a brief stint of notoriety, I was asked to provide congratulatory blurbs for other books. And on the back cover of one of these books I was Tod Wilson, author of Night Moves<\/em>. On another, I was John Walters, author of Forbidden Pulses<\/em>, my second novel being Forgotten Impulses<\/em>. What a woild!<\/p>\n

\u201cProper names are poetry in the raw.\u00a0 Like all poetry they are untranslatable.\u201d\u00a0 W.H. Auden<\/em><\/p>\n

In 1973 my mother offered me her doddering and essentially worthless Ford LTD so I could move with my girlfriend and our paltry earthly possessions from Palo Alto, California to Eugene, Oregon. We got as far as Sacramento when the old car began to shimmy like my sister Kate. By some miracle, we managed to pull into a wheel alignment garage moments before the car could shake into pieces. As it happened, we had just enough cash to fix our coach, but the mechanic said he was booked solid for three days.<\/p>\n

And so, resigned to crashing on a friends\u2019 floor for the duration, I despondently signed the estimate sheet. But when the mechanic saw my signature, his eyes widened and he blurted, \u201cWalton? You\u2019re a Walton? Walton\u2019s mountain? John Boy. The Waltons. That\u2019s our favorite show in the whole world. That show\u2026that show is the story of our life. You\u2019re a Walton?\u201d<\/p>\n

I had never seen The Waltons<\/em>, but I\u2019d heard of the popular television show and been called John Boy by countless cretins, so I vaguely knew what this fellow was talking about. I also knew that the creator of The Waltons was named something like Hammer, and the stories were based on his family\u2019s history. However, since Hammer lacked the grace and elegance of Walton, he decided\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cI gotta tell my wife,\u201d said the mechanic, nodding hopefully. \u201cCould you\u2026if we did your car this afternoon could you hang around so my wife can meet you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSure,\u201d I said, struck by the happy realization that for the first time in my life there might be some advantage to being named Walton.<\/p>\n

And though I felt compelled to explain to these good people that I was no relation to the fictional characters they worshiped, they would hear none of my disclaimers. I was a deity to them, and all because I hadn\u2019t followed the lead of many of my cohorts and changed my name to Rainbow River or Jade Sarong.<\/p>\n

The mechanic\u2019s wife presented us with a special pumpkin pie \u201cjust like the Walton\u2019s have for Thanksgiving supper.\u201d She spoke of the Waltons in the present tense, for they were very much alive to her.<\/p>\n

This blessed nonsense culminated in the mechanic donating all parts and labor to our exodus from the golden state. Then he fervently shook my hand and declared that meeting me was one of the best things that had ever happened to him. Yet neither the mechanic nor his wife seemed stupid or deranged. Indeed, they struck me as intelligent and resourceful people, their only shortcoming the inability to distinguish a television show from what they imagined to be a docudrama set in the Deep South about people related to me.<\/p>\n

When I asked if I might know their<\/em> last name, the mechanic said, \u201cOh, it\u2019s a common old name where we come from.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cStill,\u201d I said, having finally surrendered my fate to the largesse of satirical angels, \u201cI\u2019d love to know your last name?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cKnuckles,\u201d said the mechanic and his wife, speaking as one.<\/p>\n

\u201cKnuckles?\u201d I echoed. \u201cI\u2019ve never heard of anyone named Knuckles.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDime a dozen where we come from,\u201d said the mechanic\u2019s wife. \u201cAnd every last one a cousin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names.\u201d Japanese Proverb<\/em><\/p>\n

That is, if the name left is actually your name.<\/p>\n

Marcia and I just took possession of our two new CDs. The first, So not Jazz<\/em>, features Marcia on cello and yours truly on guitar and piano. The second, 43 short Piano Improvisations,<\/em> is just that: forty-three musical haiku. Our wonderful UPS delivery person brought the myriad boxes to our door, and as we gaily opened them to make sure the CDs were, indeed, ours and not those of a Fresno Reggae ensemble (which happened the last time we made a CD) I noticed the boxes were addressed to Todd Watton and Marcia Sloane. Oh, well. Just a silly typo. Todd Watton. No problem.<\/p>\n

Yes, problem. A few days after we sent out the first batch of our CDs, my brother, a highly adept computer and Interweb person, emailed me to report that all forty-three of my piano improvisations and all nine of my collaborations with Marcia were showing up on iTunes and several other digital download sites under the purview of Todd Watton. Web crawling logarithms were gobbling the misnomer and spreading it hither and yon throughout cyber space, and good luck replacing that leading T in Watton with the L we so very much wanted to be there instead.<\/p>\n

We contacted the manufacturer and they promised to do what they could to rectify the situation. We are moderately hopeful the erroneous moniker will be thoroughly expunged from the electronic highways and biways, but we won\u2019t hold our breaths. Fortunately, I subscribe to the philosophy that the occurrences composing so-called reality are not random, but only seem random because we lack sufficient data to explain why the occurrences are occurring. In honor of this philosophy, I have coined the word confluencidental<\/em>, and I hope one day this grandiloquent word will be granted entry into the Oxford English Dictionary and possibly into the yet-to-be-established Buckminster Fuller Hall of Fame. But again, I digress.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat’s in a name?\u00a0That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.\u201d William the Spear Shaker<\/em><\/p>\n

Ultimately, when my body dissolves into the mother of all molecular whirlpools and my life essence goes wherever life essences go, my names will only live as long as it takes for the people who remember me to die, for the books I\u2019ve published to turn to dust or flame, and for the recordings I\u2019ve made to become unplayable. Thereafter, Todd Walton (or Tom Walsmar or Toby Watson or Todi Watton) will only be remembered if things he or she made\u2014songs, poems, stories\u2014take on lives of such vibrancy that future generations will feel compelled to keep those creations alive. And should such miracles transpire, the names attached to those creations will surely be irrelevant.<\/p>\n

I once met a guy who claimed to have written a famous song stolen from him by the person who got famous and rich for writing the song. I have no doubt this guy honestly believed he\u2019d written the famous song the other person got the credit and money for writing. But I never liked that song, so I didn\u2019t really care one way or the other.<\/p>\n

Todd and Marcia\u2019s new CDs and songs are available for sampling and purchase at UnderTheTableBooks.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This essay was written for The Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2010) \u201cFate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.\u201d Oliver Wendell Holmes As I answer the ringing phone, I am distracted by my cat chasing his tail and do not hear the brief telltale silence presaging a stranger seeking money. \u201cHello. This is Doralinda […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[386,268,387,384,381,382,385,383,380,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4203,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}