Names

I went home for the New Year's weekend to celebrate with family and friends and to attend the wedding of my cousin Tee Reynolds (who is the most beautiful young woman in the entire world). I love going to weddings, even in my broken-marriage state. Life is so beautiful so new. Love is young and full of potential, before selfishness and mental illness can spoil it. (Whoops. This is supposed to be a positive blog.) And the great thing now is that I can actually go to out-of-Nebraska weddings. When I was in radio, I couldn't leave during our ratings periods which tended to be in the Spring and Fall, also a very popular time for weddings. Tee has 7 other brothers and sisters so there have been 6 Reynolds weddings in the past 12 or so years and I have missed most of them.

I ran into my cousin's cousin Steve.(I'm not sure if I am related to him or not. If I am once, twice or thrice-removed/) The joke was that at the last Reynolds cousin's wedding, Steve introduced his wife by the wrong name. I think they had been married for a year and he introduced her to my sister as "Amy." Her name is Kim. Whoops! My sister tried to make a joke about how the people in our family always call people by the wrong names, but the year-old bride was not happy.

At another Reynolds wedding, my mother was seated at a table with her brother and his new girlfriend. My mother has a fabulous personality, a warm spirit and can remember lots of things....except the names of things. So you can imagine how great it went over when my mom kept referring to her brother's new girlfriend, "Kathy" as "Sally" his ex-wife's name.

I have had lots of names over my life. I have been Sue Bayou, Deanna Santana, Deanna D, Cyndi Layne and maybe one or two others that I can't think of. My step-mom asked me at the dinner table the night before New Year's whether or not I was going to keep my married name. Absolutely! I've never felt that my name made me who I was. What I did, what I said, how I made people feel, that is what made me who I was. Never my name. A name is just something that you use to call someone. And sometimes people don't even get that right.

My mother-in-law (ex-mother-in-law?) has a terrific method of getting your attention. She came from a family of like 32 kids, had 5 of her own, and somehow always had the neighborhood hanging out at her house. She calls everyone "Charlie." She only needs to remember one name, and, believe it or not, you know exactly when she's referring to you.

And then discussion turned to whether or not I should change the name of this blog. Chris has suggested that I change it for a while, considering I don't talk too much about football. My sister Krissy says that it makes me sound like I should have a son on the Nebraska team. The name came from the idea that I am a mom from Nebraska and I write little stories. But again, the name isn't too important to me, so I'm up for suggestions. "Off the Air?" "The Mic-less Wonder?" "When's She Gonna Snap?" Send me an e-mail or note with any ideas that you have and I will consider them.

Or I suppose I could always call it "A Day with Charlie."