Names

Names

One of the things that’s hard about learning another language is people’s names. When we English speakers hear “Mary”, we know it means a person, a female person. “Olive” might be a woman or a condiment, and “Bill” could be a man or an invoice, but most of the time, names, especially first names, are just that, and also familiar. Cathy, Joan, Otis, Leroy. We’d never have to embarrass ourselves by saying, “Pardon me, but what is a Leroy?” Or “what does Leroy mean?” (I know, I know, once it meant “the king”, but not in English.)

We’ve got some lulus of first names in my family. Well, not literally, but we do have Lorena, Mabel, Hazel, Fanny, Luba, Minnie, Gertrude, just to pick on the female side, but then there’s Olin and Oscar and Maynard and Brazelle (the last two held by the same person) on the male side. And that’s just scratching the surface. Oh, we also have Mary and Deborah and Carolyn and Sandra and Joe and Jack and Cathy, but we seem to prefer the more original, less common.

I’m familiar with a number of foreign names, mostly French and Spanish—Jacque, Monique, Mario, Guillermo, Pedro, Juan—but when I began to get colleagues from other parts of the world, like Africa and the Middle East, I was at a total loss with the names, both for pronunciation and for gender. Take “Kanu”, for instance, which isn’t can-oo, but kah-nu. And it’s a man. How about Jehu, and Abiola, and Sekelani and Sabri and Samrendra. And that’s just the first names. Imagine my excitement when I met another Sekelani, only to be told that it’s quite a common name in Zambia.

Actually a number of my African friends of a certain age, that is those with educated parents who lived under colonial rule, have two first names, one African, one English, as in Sekelani Stanley Banda and Abiola Juliette Olowu. Lizo Mazwei, though, was just that. The only English part of his name was the MD at the end.

My Body and Me

My Body and Me

Funny, but I don’t really feel that
I have cancer anymore.
It happened gradually, this lack of feeling
Increasing as the outside help dropped off,
The cards and emails decreased,
The “how ARE you?’s” diminished.
As other associated medical problems
Took over the focus—the lymphedema,
The compression fracture, the enlarged thyroid.
What hasn’t changed is how the care of this molecular vessel
I live in now dominates my days.
Exercises, self-massages, special nutrition, pill-taking
(which ones at which times), medical appointments,
and the continual assessment of new and unexpected twinges.
Just when I’m feeling more of a need to feed my soul,
my body is demanding its due.
Maybe heaven is the place where you live without awareness of your body.
At least that would be heaven for me.