Nick-Names

When my daughter was born, naming her was easy.  Antoinette was my mother's name, pretty and unusual, the feminine for Anthony, unlike the guttural Agnes that I was saddled with.  Named after my father's mother, not only was Agnes an ugly name, but the things that rhyme with the abbreviated "Aggie" just scream out traumatic childhood.  Little did it matter that in Italian it has a beautiful sound and pretty damn lofty meaning.  While I was always Agnes, my mother was never called by her beautiful name; she was known as "Dora."  Who knows why.  My poor mom as a little girl, aeons before the days of Dora the Explorer, I'm sure had been hammered with clever and alliterative epithets like "dumb Dora."

So my sweet firstborn was Antoinette.  My father, who was eternally mourning my mother, whom he had tormented with complaints and criticism all her life, tried to call my baby "Dora" once when we were visiting, and when she was only a few months old.  In a rare display of unity, my two sisters and I shouted, "NO!" and informed my father that she was NOT going to be Dora.

Relatives on the other side began to call her Toni, which never stuck, I guess because she wasn't a Toni.  Not on my watch.  So Antoinette it was.

Of course, when she began to speak, her name was quite a mouthful.  So "Antoinette" became "Ettyouette" which of course we thought was adorable, and somehow it became shortened it to "Etty."  I have a scarf I knitted for my little girl, with "Etty" embroidered on it.

And then, when she went to school, we all gave up Etty.  Since then, Antoinette has occasionally been "Ant," most often by herself in her own writing, but not to her face by anyone else.  So, Antoinette it remains.

When my son came along, the agreement had been that since the first child had been my choice, from my side of the family, the second would be from my husband's side.  Had the second been a girl it most likely would have been Sophia, somehow after his sister Elaine?  Go figure.  More likely, it was the feminine of his own name, Stephan, which I think I was told was the Americanized version of Sophianos.  Which doesn't make any more sense than Dora from Antoinette, as the Greek name is Stefanos.  But I do have fond memories of Stephan's Aunt Faye tunefully calling out, "Oh, Sofionoulyi!"  Also interesting is that "Stephan," pronounced "Stefan" was further misspelled by his mother on the birth certificate, which reads, "Stephen."

But our second wasn't a girl, and Stephan has a family full of Johns and Williams, and we weren't interested in having a junior.  So we were thinking of Greek-sounding male alternatives and ended up with Alexander and Nicholas.  And somehow decided that Nicholas was the more unusual.

So my second child was named Nicholas.  And, although I only know this through our home videos, we began to call the boy "Nicky."

And then, one day in my son's infancy, we were shopping at the mall, and from many different directions, throughout the course of the afternoon, we heard the echo of my son's nickname.  Nicky/Nikki had apparently become the name of choice for pretty much most of the kids in our suburban neighborhood.

We were crestfallen.  We (honestly, it was probably me that was behind all this) had truly thought that we had come up with a rare and noble name for our unique second child.  I recall that we talked long and seriously about this quandary.  And eventually we came up with a solution:  Our son's nickname became "Nikko."  And it worked.  It is a name as rare and wonderful as "Antoinette."  He has tried to be called Nicholas at times, but I think in the end he just gave a philosophical shrug and accepted that he was, indeed, "Nikko."

Absence of Dad

I'm reading a hysterically funny book by Jim Gaffigan called Dad Is Fat.  As he described his dad and his determination not to be at all like him, I commiserated.  My father was not an alcoholic, he was miserable without the aid of an intoxicant.

He was born and raised in Italy, in Sardinia, he would have you know, which is better than Italy.  I believe he was hard of hearing, speaking very loud very broken English all his life.  Because he was loud, he also appeared to be constantly angry, even when he was joking.  And by the way, he had no sense of humor.  Joking amounted to making fun of someone.  He loved All In the Family, and began to fondly call my mother a dingbat after Edith Bunker.  Ha ha.

Because he slipped into the US illegally, when he was found out he had to go back to Italy.  Thanks to intervention by Senator John O. Pastore, forever after known as a saint, and because he was married with two children, he was allowed to go do whatever he had to do to make Italy and the US happy, and then come back.

I was three.  He had decided he wanted to take me with him, even got me a passport,

at which time my mother flipped out, assuming he would take me and never come back.  This was either due to my mother's pervasive fearfulness, understandable under the circumstances, or my father's inability to instill confidence in him, probably both.  Anyway, I lost my big chance to go to Italy.

When he left my mother, she had me, my infant sister, and my wheelchair-bound grandmother, no driver's license, and a farmhouse in the boonies.  She had a nervous breakdown, which back in the day meant she was anxious and depressed.  Back in the day she was prescribed sleeping pills, which added to the troubles.  Assorted uncles would drive her to get groceries and aunts would try to tell her everything was going to be all right.

He was gone for I believe three years.  That's a long time for a woman with I'm assuming no income, no means of transportation, an invalid mother and toddler, and a baby.

I have absolutely no recollection of those years.  My memories start back up again when I started first grade.  And because my mother had a huge dysfunctional family, and the dysfunction continued with my immediate family, and mostly involved poor communication, you now know as much as I know about those years.

I can only imagine the effects of the separation on each of us.  I was already chubby and too serious so I can't blame the separation on that.  But I do recall one Halloween night when my father was taking us around to visit a couple of aunts and uncles.  I believe I was somewhere around eight.  Shortly after we got to Aunt Vivian and Uncle Jim's my dad and my uncle left.  I doubt that he was gone long, but when he came back I was in tears, inconsolable, because I thought he'd been abducted.  Not that he took off, but was taken away.  In fact, he had gone to help my uncle change a tire.

I wonder if the separation when I was small and my sister newborn led to him feeling alienated from us.  Was he angrier when he got back than when he left?  No idea.

But the inhumanity of forcing a parent to leave a family to satisfy legal requirements of citizenship for god's sake.  You just need to put yourself in the shoes of the immigrant, who just wanted to come here to have a better life.

At least he got all those t's crossed and dotted those i's.

Ninja Cat on Cockroach Patrol

Learning to live with Palmetto bugs was quite the adjustment.  Was once a time if I spotted one when I was vacationing in the South, I would have to wake someone up to dispatch the critter.  Once, in Mexico, I upturned a wastebasket over one before I alerted my companion, just so it wouldn't scurry into hiding, only to come out again once I was asleep.

My son's cat, Blueberry, who I inherited when he left, was what they call a feral cat, which meant you wanted to be really careful when you picked him up.  We developed a ritual, after dinner, where I sat on the porch, and he hunted cockroaches, for dessert.  Apparently, he enjoyed the crunch.

My cat Molly is a cat of a whole different nature.  For one thing, she has no idea that there is an outdoors.  When I go outside, she assumes I have just vanished, and waits patiently until I reappear.  Happily, she has no clue that anything exists above the height of a chair, and has never attempted to explore the heights of the kitchen table.

She also is clueless about bugs.  Out here in the boonies, they frequently find their way inside, and she is astute in finding them.  But what to do with them once they are found, well, she has yet to figure that out.  If they are airborne, she will keep her eye on them, and will even chase them across a room most likely losing them in the process.  If it is scurrying on the floor, she is quick enough to catch it, but when she gets there, she just half-heartedly swats at it, till it foolishly tries to run away, and then she repeats the routine until either she or the bug lose their zest.

Molly lives in a jacuzzi-sized bathtub in the bathroom adjacent to my bedroom.  Last night, as I was sitting there, I heard a large animal moving quickly, and of course saw that it was a Palmetto bug.  As Groucho might wonder, how it got in my bathtub I'll never know.  But fact is, in its panicked attempt to run up the side, it stupidly flipped itself over.  My cat, ever on the ready, jumped up on the side of the tub and watched it for a minute or so.  Then she leaped in and meandered over to it, saw what needed to be done, swatted at it a couple of times, and flipped it back over on its "feet."  And when it started to move, Molly took off.

Followed was me leaning into the tub, trying to get it to come out of hiding behind the litter.  Then I chose one of the number of books that I had sitting on the side of the tub, and unceremoniously dropped it on the roach.  The book I chose was one about battling cancer, which pretty much describes my feelings about the topic.

Molly, of course, was nowhere to be found.