So is this entry about my problematic name, or my cheapskate proclivities?
With a side trip into What My Father Taught Me?
Yes, and no, or sort of. Hey, this is the age of e- this and e- that, so how about a little e-quivocation?
Maybe it’s me, 46 years later, processing my change of name to Neumann-Rea, so bear with me one last memory exploration of that strange summer.
As a side theme in the Handle, I’ve written of late about fragmentation – how my brain seems to either feed on or create thinking that often feels scattered and piecemeal. And yet, the shards and segments someone pull together, or so I tell myself.
In exploring my name, or should I say names, and the folds and frays of that fabric, I confess to trying to stitch together a variety of things that may seem disparate: softball, a dive bar, a notarized legal document, and old fence posts. Oh, that part is coming.
This is me at 20:
To briefly review: I was born Kirby Rea, adding the Neumann at age 20 as a way of honoring my mother’s family name. Which brings me to another sidetrip, into something my father definitely did not teach me. Only maybe it was really about something he taught me. I better explain:
Dad’s non-interest, if not opposition, to dive-bars had a critical role in that name change, or how it came about. It was a legal name change, from Rea to Neumann-Rea, and the rules in Linn County, Oregon, 1978, were that before a judge would grant the change, a petitioner had to post a notarized statement at three “public places” – one of them the courthouse itself. The postings had to remain there for two weeks.
Now, my intention in changing my name was to surprise my parents with it, so to comply with the legal name change process, and to keep it from my parents, how to find two other places that Don and Betty were unlikely to see or to have some friend see and tip them off? I chose a laundromat bulletin board – and a local bar. I mentioned in earlier post that “I was always intrigued by the Longer Longer as a kid” after we’d moved to Albany in 1972. I guess I continue to be. The point is that in 1978 the Linger Longer is the last place my parents would have gone.
That year I recognized it as the perfect third posting place for my change-of-name notice; how did I go about it? I don’t quite remember; I think it had an outdoor bulletin board and I just tacked it up. I must not have gone inside, for I was still just 20. I also have no recollection of taking the postings down, though I must have. (What if hung there, weather-worn, for years? What if it’s still there?)
Also, I have no specific recollection of that court appearance, in which I had to stand and look the judge in the eye and vow that my request was in no way motivated by fraudulent intent. I’ve written before about wishing to have better “emotional memory” of key events in my past, and this is one of those. You’d think I’d remember that moment in June 1978, in court, just as I specifically remember going to court for my first speeding ticket in 1976. Just as I remember that 1977 road trip to Crater Lake, or my 1978 summer job and getting hazed by the rednecks in the city parks crew.
What I do remember is that my big announcement about the name change, there in the living room of 1008 E. 31st in Albany, landed with a kind of thud. My parents, bless their memory: Dad was a little hurt by the name change and Mom kind of perplexed. It took awhile, but my parents did come to like the fact I changed my name. The news came the same summer I decided to spend the next school year in Israel, so the two major developments acted as bookends to support that season of surprise.
Now, in life’s third act, for select purposes I’ve shifted to Neumann Rea. I like the sound of it, and it is a streamlined way of remembering both my parents while also setting these works apart from a career of newspaper writing. Though that career isn’t done, not yet, and I am far from done with the name Kirby … — N.R.
Of course being in print our name is very important. I’ve been E. Michael since I was a teenager and I’ve carried that through to movies - where it may be even more important. I’m really liking these short insights and histories.
I think that you are a man of many thoughtful names! All of them translate to being a skilled and evocative author.