I remember when I brought home from school a paper that had my name on it. My father saw what I had written — “Jon Woods” — and told me that I was to never again bring home anything on which I had not written my full name. It is possible that I have repressed some memory of the actual repercussions of that error — my father was violent and unpredictable — but laughter is always possible in life.
I am the first-born of five children. Two boys were first; a girl came third, then two more boys. I understand from my mother that my father was the “namer” of the children and we all have some creative twist to our names. Nothing like the liberties taken by today’s parents, just slight variations. My middle name, as I am wont to say, is “John without the ‘h’;” My brother was Charl, (pronounced ‘Karl’) and my sister is Caryn (Karen). We five all have first and middle names that start with “CJ,” (which was my father’s nickname) and the first three all had nicknames that end with “i:” Joni, Jerri, Jaci (Jackie).
I did everything with my brother and sister when we were small. My brother was born 18 months after me, and my sister 15 months after him. We clustered together as if seeking warmth from each other’s bodies and went everywhere as a three-headed unit. On Saturday mornings, we would wake and dress and walk to the Carnegie Library, which was (I have since learned) about three miles from our house. We would spend half the day in the library, check out books and travel through the connecting tunnel into the attached Carnegie Museum of Art. Admission to the museum was free when we were young, and we roamed the exhibit halls in wonder, unattended and uninterrupted. In good weather, we would spend some time in Panther Hollow, a woods-like park over the hill from the library and museum. My brother later claimed that he tried to get us to spend some time at the park’s Phipps Conservatory, but I do not remember spending time in the flower house until I was older.
One activity we young three participated in (with apologies to the poet Henry Reed) was not “a naming of parts,” but learning our own names. We knew our nicknames, which is all the names that children know until told that we have more: Joni, Jerri, Jaci. When called, we came. But according to my mother, we had regular sessions of “learn your full names.” We sat and listened to our father pronounce our names, then one by one, we were asked to repeat them.
My brother Jerri was the second of my mother’s sons to die, in 1999. Though he had become my personal hero, I was his hero when we were small. I took advantage of his adoration on more occasions than I can remember, including tricking him into swallowing a penny. He did anything I asked, and followed my lead in everything. This included, apparently, the learning of names.
“Jerri,” my mother would ask my bother, “what is your name?” Though he had already responded to his own nickname, my brother would rattle off, “Kimmie Kon Wood da turd.” He had sat beside me on so many occasions during the “learning of names,” that he had internalized the name spoken by his brother, not the one given to him by his father.
I smiled at my mother’s laughter: “Kimmie Kon Wood da turd,” was my brother’s way of saying, Clement Jon Woods, III.