LETTERS FROM HOME: PLAYING THE NAME GAME WITH ALIAS MOM AND DAD

Oct. 7, 1999

Dear Julie,

Imagine DC's surprise to discover her in-laws are living under assumed names.

They don't have aliases because they fought the law and they're not federally protected witnesses. They aren't former Reds still in hiding either. They have other names because their parents -- like my parents -- christened them with children's names. It makes sense if you don't think about it.

In DC's family, most everybody has a first name fit for a White House correspondent. Thus, DC ordered airline tickets for a trip we're taking with our parents assuming my own parents' names were Patricia and Joseph because everyone calls them Pat and Joe. Close but no boarding pass.

I come from a tradition in which many of our first names are more likely to be found on a football player from a Deep South college. According to their driver's licenses, my parents are Patsy and, inexplicably to DC, Bobbie. I knew that. She didn't. We're married.

In this age of metal detectors in the schools, the travel agent advised that the airline might let my mother on the plane but the discrepancy would leave my father at the gate. The tickets had to be reissued in the name of national security.

This is the curse of the urge to put a y-sound on the end of a name. It lingers from childhood, when we y-up every dog, bird and cat in sight. Birdies, kitties and doggies are Tweety, Blacky and Snoopy.

Most of my friends from high school still call me Sammy. But in college, Sammy sounded like a little boy's name. I became Sam. Short. Manly. Nothing will make you want to give up being a little boy like being around big girls. Sam I am.

The question of how your name fits arises when you start wondering who you are. The process of finding out is without end, but everyone has times when they have had a better idea than others.

During one period when people I didn't know asked if Sam was my legal name, I'd fess up and say "No.

"It's Samuel."

At some point you at least can draw a circle around who you are. You know you aren't Sammy and you aren't Samuel. What relief.

As someone else has said in another context, the soul rejoices in hearing what it already knows.

When my parents became adults they did what I did: exchanged their childhood names for adult ones just in case they wanted to be able to stand in front of the White House. I don't think that's such a bad idea. Consider it a rite of passage.

DC is now teaching part-time at a university 50 miles away, sees patients at a mental hospital 30 miles away, and teaches one night a week at a vocational-technical school besides keeping up her practice here.

Nights she prepares lesson plans until 11 p.m. I have renewed respect for teachers.

We meet for dinner sometimes. She still knows my name.

Except for the part about having to pay to have the tickets reissued, this business about the aliases amuses DC. I don't have to remind her that her name and her two sisters' names are all variations of their father's. But then a rose named Gertie would smell as sweet.

Love, Sam