This Cursive Note

Did you do anything for Saint Patrick's Day?  Me neither.

One time a friend told me he thought Saint Patrick might be Patrick Stewart of "Star Trek" & "X-Men" fame.  I told him that, in general, saints usually get to be saints by dying for their religious conviction.  We both agreed that Patrick Stewart was not at the time dead (he is currently at the time of this writing also not dead) but we were unsure what, if anything, he had in fact been convicted of.

Also one time I knew a guy named "Rick" & I would occasionally call him "Richard" & he would always correct me by saying "Patrick," & while I completely understood that "Rick" could be a diminutive of "Patrick," I myself would probably have gone for the more obvious "Pat" although knowing this guy he might be upset that his name was somewhat ambiguous gender-wise, as the famous Saturday Night Live character would attest.

This happened, too, in my family.  I have a brother named James, but everyone called him Jamie.  My mother still calls him Jamie.  I don't know why I put names in quotation marks in the previous paragraph but now I am not doing so.  Probably I am just lazy.  Anyway, my brother Jamie's middle name is Ralph & so at some point in my childhood - & at some point in his late teens - he got tired of people calling him Jamie, which I think he thought was effeminate, & also was the name of the secret identity of the Bionic Woman on television, & he had us call him Ralph.  I call him that to this day.  My mother, as I said, still calls him Jamie.

In a shocking twist worthy of O. Henry Dickens, I discovered, when we (my brother Ralph & I) became friends on Facebook, that his co-workers call him James, which is probably what he wanted all along.  He doesn't seem like a James to me anymore, he seems totally like a Ralph.

What he should have done, if I can give him advice too late for it to do him any good, is he should have corrected the teacher when she called him "Jamie" in elementary school or at the very least in middle school, around sixth grade.  I knew a guy named Larry Campbell who always said, on the first day of school, that people called him "Rocko."  & so the teacher - & everyone else - did.

& now it occurs to me that though I've spent a good deal of my life wishing that my own name had more interesting diminutives than "Gar," "Gare," or "Gaz," although I do love "Gaz," it seems a good thing that usually people called Gary can only be called Gary, as you avoid the need to summon social strength to tell teachers you want to be called something different than what is written on the attendance sheet or, in my brother James Ralph's case, what is exactly there.

When I was at Trader Joe's the other day, a checkout fellow probably five or six years older than I am had my name on his nametag so I told him my name was also Gary.  We mourned the slow death of our name, & he asked if I were named for someone famous.  "Everyone in the US named Gary," I said, "was ultimately named for Gary Cooper."  "Really?" he said.  "I thought I was named for Gary US Bonds."

So, no, no.  I didn't do anything for Saint Patrick's Day.