I
am pushing eighty now and am beginning to think about how many writing projects
I’ll be able to finish before I forget how to type. One of these is a kind of
autobiography with the working title “The Girl With Many Names.”
When
I divorced my third husband (yes; I learned my modest people skills the hard
way) some 25 years ago, I asked the judge to restore my maiden name. I had to
ask twice. I still get Christmas cards addressed to various old names, and
while I am glad to be remembered, I think 25 years is sufficient to accommodate
a name change.
Partly
I wanted to go back to my original name because my father, not realizing that
it would hurt my feelings, said something about having only one male descendent
to “carry on the name.” Partly it was because I was tired of being married and
tired of having my name indicate I was somebody’s property...though it wasn’t
as bad as the Greek system of a wife’s having her given name followed by “of”
and both the husband’s names.
When
Nicodemus and I got married sixteen or seventeen years ago, Father Anthony of
blessed memory put us through weeks of premarital counseling and made us go
over and analyze every failed relationship we had ever had. It took us a long time to get it right,
and we don’t plan on marrying anybody else. Although Father Anthony was a
traditionalist and didn’t truck with the maiden name business, I persisted in
keeping my last name and nobody ever challenged it.
It
is a tribute to Nicodemus that various stores call HIM by my maiden name and
that he doesn’t particularly care one way or another.
My
son Ed recently applied for a passport and had to produce the document he has
instead of a birth certificate, a statement from the American consulate in
Thessaloniki certifying the birth of a child abroad to an American citizen. “It
says my middle name is Anthony,” he said. “I always thought it was Antonios.”
“Well,
now you’ve had an Ellis Island moment,” I said, thinking of all the new
Americans whose names were too foreign for the clerks at the famous immigration
office to pronounce. The consulate
officer had translated “of Antonios” into “Anthony.”
My
just-released novel, BYLINE, has an Ellis Island moment when an editor changes
the heroine’s Greek name into something that’s “easier for the people.”
And
I won’t even start on my first name, which I have to explain to someone almost
every day. It’s just plain old MY-KUL, I tell them. Like David’s first wife in
the Bible. Not Michelle or Mikaela or, as a childhood playmate once essayed,
Mackerel.
