Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong. My paternal grandmother’s name was Nava, which, in Hebrew, translates to “beautiful.” In the biblical Song of Songs, it says, “Thou art beautiful [nava], O my love, as Tirzah, beautiful [nava] as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.” By the time I met my Nava, she wasn’t quite beautiful, or terrible. She was essentially a shriveled up little raisin in a modest, tweed skirt and thirty-five-year-old glasses. She was certainly sweet and cute, and raisiny, but I’m not sure she was beautiful. I suppose at one time she was—her husband certainly thought so anyway.
One day my father and I were talking about names, for some reason, children’s names; what you name your children. I asked him if, when my mother was pregnant with me, he’d ever brought up the idea with her about naming me after his own father. He exploded at me.
“Gabriel! What are you, fuckin’ stupid?!” he asked, rhetorically, I hope.
“Well, Dad, I mean, you…” I began.
“Look Gabriel; having a child is a huge responsibility, okay? You can really fuck a kid up right from the beginning if you call him the wrong thing,” my father explained to me. I protested.
“The ‘wrong thing?’ Dad, you know, he was your father.”
“So?” he frothed. “He’s still my father, and you are my son, and it’s a terrible name so why would I do it to you? MoRAD?” he roared, punching out the last syllable each time like a veteran heavyweight. “You think I wanted to name you MoRAD?! Next you’ll say I should have named you after me. Efraim,” he said contemptuously of his own identity. “Another fuckin’ retard name!”
My father, finished for the time being, got up from the dining room table, randomly announced that he was going to “The Camera Shop” and left.
I didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. His bombastic, Israeli rants are a product of the desert from which he came, and are just meant to be endured and accepted. He blows up all the time, like a rear-ended Pinto, but locating the catalyst usually proves a superhuman investigative feat. I didn’t figure this one out for a while.
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Tags: emt, family, growing old, names, Non-Fiction, parents
Posted in Non-Fiction | 9 Comments »
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