Names

I'm impressed when people rattle off the names of flowers or identify trees by their leaves, or needles, or bark, or know mushrooms by their shapes and spores.

I'd like to recite a litany of the proper names for rocks and shells, for cloud formations, for the strata of the earth. Instead I imagine what it's like to dwell inside a moon snail, or to be tumbled smooth by the ocean, or to look at the sky and see a chariot.

To name. To be the person who names another. To earn a name: I named my son after my grandfather David. My grandfather had worn paint splattered clothes five days a week and then every Friday evening he put on a white shirt and welcomed the Sabbath. I loved to hear him chant the ancient prayers.

I lived close to the Bronx Zoo and learned to read the names of animals before I learned to read a proper text.

There are other names. Names that incite and names that hurt—a hurt corkscrewing into your marrow. Names invoked for an entire people, stereotypes that pass down from generation to generation. The pronoun they resounds with venom.

Naming is a gift. Discover a new orchid and it may bear your name.

Yesterday I heard a father call his little girl "my sunshine". That's a gift.