Five Loves
An Exercise in Curiosity
My father wrote me three letters in one week, big block capitals on yellow legal paper. The first letter began with, “Dear Devan, Ha ha ha! Yes! Dad is writing a letter. Don’t send it back with red marks all over it.” The last one ended with, “I love Devan. Dad.” Now that he is retired and his time is his own he is calmer, funnier, texts more, uses emojis. He collects expensive sunglasses and walkie talkies. When I went home for the weekend, he showed me his collections and demonstrated them all. He told me, for the first time, that he grew up with horses: a pony named Crystal and a fearful old stallion called Butch. He told me about his childhood friend who shared his name, and whose father was always mean to my dad, and how his friend’s father later shot himself in the head with a shotgun. “Everyone who’s ever dissed me is dead now,” he said shyly, grinning.
In January, I subscribed to both Vogue and Vanity Fair because they offered a deal: one year and a tote bag for $12, or something. Truthfully I am most interested in the tote bags. Packing for my weekend trip home I stuffed a bunch of dirty laundry in the mint green Vogue bag to wash in my parents’ basement. In the car on the way to Ohio I rubbed a page perfumed with Coco Mademoiselle on my wrists and neck. I like being someone who finds Vogue in her mailbox, who has Vanity Fair lying on her coffee table, who rubs crumpled scented pages on her skin; it makes me feel flirty, feminine, traditional, thrifty, childish, mature.
Tag yourself, I’m 509. The other week, I posed this question to S: “What is something that made you feel curious lately?” He thought and said, “Ben-Day dots.” I’d never heard of them but they made me think of a bento box. He explained: “They’re the dots used to shade and color comics, named after the man who invented them: Benjamin Day.” S is thinking about how he can incorporate Ben-Day dots in his oil paintings. When he turned my question back on me, I had a hard time thinking of an answer. Eventually I said, “School of Rock and Uptown Girls are essentially the same story.” It’s true, but I don’t know what to do with this information, and I wish I’d had more to be curious about that week.
My cat leaped onto the bed to greet me this morning and I said, “Hi there, Spanky!” His name isn’t Spanky, it’s Buddy, but I think Spanky could have been a good name for him if it’d come to me at the time. Buddy suits him fine. However, it was something of a last resort; I’d had him for a month and still hadn’t settled on what to call him. Mr. Personality (his given name)? Fennel? Klaus Von Furkenschtein? Unlike my previous cat, Nick, whose name came to me from the air, Buddy’s true name remains elusive, even now—“The name,” Eliot wrote, “that no human research can discover, / but THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, / and will never confess.” S has discovered that if he whistles “Rule Britannia,” Buddy will come trotting over. Is it possible Buddy’s real name is actually a tune?
This isn’t the cover I have. This one is much nicer. We call Buddy all kinds of nicknames of course, like many pet owners do. His full name is Buddy Tumbles but we call him Trundle Bed, Dink, Chumbles, Chubbles, Big Chubbles in Little China, Tugboat, Spanky, etcetera. Lately I’ve been reading Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and in it the protagonist rebels against the notion of official names:
What a lack of imagination it is to have official first names and surnames. No one ever remembers them, they’re so divorced from the Person, and so banal that they don’t remind us of them at all. . . . That’s why I try my best never to use first names and surnames, but prefer epithets that come to mind of their own accord the first time I see a Person. I’m sure this is the right way to use language, rather than tossing about words stripped of all meaning. . . . I believe each of us sees the other Person in our own way, so we should give them the name we consider suitable and fitting. Thus we are polynymous. We have as many names as the number of people with whom we interact.
She rejects her own given name—Janina—and gives new names to her neighbors and everyone she knows: Oddball. Big Foot. Dizzy. Why are nicknames reserved mostly for people we are intimate with? (Even so, S just calls me “Babe.”) Maybe giving new and special names to everyone you meet would foster more intimacy between you and folks you might otherwise not become close to. At the same time, I hope nobody looks at me and thinks, Big Foot. What would I call the people in my life? S might be “Dusk.” My younger sister, “Pisces.” My older sister, “Romance.” My brother, “Convo.” My mom, “Ovaltine.” My dad, “Cherry on top.” I don’t think I can give myself a name. I know what I hope people might call me, but it doesn’t seem right to discuss it.
While I started out the year hoping to write more regularly, I’ve fallen a little behind lately, mostly because I’ve been pretty distracted by a new job (hooray?). I’m determined to get back on track, though, and I thought I’d start with a “Five Things” exercise, which I learned about from my friend and fellow writer Kelsey Swintek, and which you can read more about here.
Wonderfully beautiful read that also made me chuckle :)
I love everything about this 🥹