Names 4

In a club of people all with at least one sobriquet, it would be odd that the president didn't have one, wouldn't it?

Santos is an odd duck. Whether by design or happenstance, my brief acquaintanceship with him left me with a colorful bevy of memories and secondhand stories. However, this memory is about his name.

We went to a Gulf Coast Fencing Tournament. The club stayed in a town called Mathis. Mathis, Texas, has a population of around 5000. Mathis was the hometown of Santos, so we stayed at his folks' house the night before the tournament.

We only met 3 men, as in were introduced to, in our stay there. All three of them were named Santos, as they were Santos's grandfather, his father, and himself.

Imagine our surprise when Santos's mother called out, "Joelle," and Santos responded. The man who had changed a guy's name (the guy's longtime girlfriend still calls him by the new name) yet never got called anything other than his name ... well we still didn't have a nickname to call him, Joelle is his middle name.

Santos, like myself, is El Salvadorian. A common practice amongst El Salvadorians, as amongst Ancient Romans, is to not go by your first name. (Julius Caesar, one of the greatest men that ever lived was actually Gaius Julius Caesar. Gaius was his given name, he was of the house Julii, and he was called Caesar.) My father is René Mauricio. For family and friends, he is Mauricio. For coworkers, he is René.


What's in a name? To some people it holds cosmic significance. Some people believe one must live up to your name if it was written in a book two millennia ago. Some people believe that names are punishments you can inflict on your offspring just because you can. My name is literally "Reborn." I'm not sure about all of that. My pseudonym, the name I chose for me, is nonsensical, but it's mine. My default name for a crazy character is also nonsensical, but again, it's mine. I even have a song for her.

You can imagine how difficult it was to agree on what to name a person of our own.