How Do We Name Our Children?

5/1/2014

Robert Herrick. Honored on May Day

Every name has a story, and our daughter Corinna tells hers in a lovely May Day essay today.

http://www.wilson500.com/uncategorized/my-name-day-and-the-value-of-a-good-affordable-education/

She tells the story on the day when she witnessed her friend Jacky Nkubito become an American citizen in DC.

The name happened as Corinna tells it. I was taking a course on the Cavalier Poets with Dr. Ruth Stauffer at Hofstra College in the spring of 1960, the last semester of my very good liberal arts education. I loved the urgency of Andrew Marvell:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

It’s possible I might even have used those words, or at least felt the sentiment, in that beautiful flowering spring.

I also loved the poem Corinna’s Going a-Maying by Robert Herrick, which our daughter describes so nicely.

So how did we name our two other children? Marianne and I agree that her mom, still with us at 93, loved the name Laura. Also, Marianne and I both knew the David Raksin song “Laura,” from the noir movie of the same name, from 1944.

Laura is the face in the misty light
Footsteps that you hear down the hall
The laugh that floats on a summer night
That you can never quite recall.

One version is by Frank Sinatra -- long before his ring-a-ding-ding stage, I hasten to add. It's a little lush, but a time piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uXPeBRt1fM

I was sold as soon as the name Laura was proposed for our oldest daughter.

And she’s not the only Laura named for the song. In the comments portion of the youtube Sinatra version, LauraLaVitaEBella says her grandfather gave her the name. Bravo, Nonno.

How did we arrive at David for our third child?

Marianne notes that I wanted to name him Dylan. It would have been perfect. She counter-proposed David – for the Michelangelo statue in Florence.

Many years later, I came to understand King David through the Leonard Cohen song, written in 1984, now one of the great touchstones of contemporary life.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/how-leonard-cohens-hallelujah-became-everybodys-hallelujah/265900/

Personally, I am partial to the k.d. lang version on her glorious Canadian tribute, Hymns of the 49th Parallel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0UHv7mDG4s

So I say, Hallelujah for music and poetry and art. Hallelujah for May Day. And Hallelujah for Citizen Jacky in DC today.

Citizen Jacky (in shades)and Friends. May Day. Photo: CV Wilson.

Roy Edelsack

5/2/2014 03:35:44 am

George you are going to turn me into a blubbering old fool. This beautiful column came on the same day that my son Samuel (named for his great uncle, the only european Edelsack who survived the holocaust) was awarded the New Jersey Governor's Medal for outstanding achievement in film. Sam is autistic but he won this outright against all high school students in the state.

Children, the arts, and "naches." Yesterday was a wonderful day.

George Vecsey

5/2/2014 10:12:18 am

wow, that is the best news of today.
please tell Sam congratulations from a friend.
So great that he has this outlet.
You saw Ron Suskind's article in the NYT mag recently about his son who was touched by Disney. We are just learning.
Thanks for sharing this beautiful news.
GV

Brian Savin

5/4/2014 04:09:22 am

Roy, there was a wonderful "article" on Charles Osgood's Sunday Morning an hour or so ago about the wonderful reporter/writer Ron Suskind's (e.g., "Confidence Men") autistic son whose life was transformed by the power of Disney movies. If life is a but a dream, dreams make our lives. Congratulations.

Ed Martin

5/2/2014 04:08:13 am

Lovely! Corinna's article overflows with love. Yours, as well, and Roy's comment adds more beauty.

George Vecsey

5/2/2014 10:14:08 am

Ed, thanks for looking up Corinna's piece. It is very rewarding to a parent of any age to see that a child has internalized something she heard (probably often in this case, but still.)
GV

Mendel

5/2/2014 05:06:52 am

I always wondered what I would be called if my parents had not chosen the name of a deceased ancestor. Now, my children are also named for departed relatives. Not terribly creative, but sincere and sentimental.

George Vecsey

5/2/2014 10:18:21 am

Mendel, not at all. Growing up with Jewish friends, I heard many stories about the preservation of names. It is a wonderful custom, more poignant given the terrible gaps in history. We have some names that pop up from generation to generation, but having it as a custom makes it more touching. Shabbat Shalom. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

How Do We Name Our Children?

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