What's in a Name?

Since we are away all day, we tape (note my old fashioned terminology; I even call a CD or digital recording a record) Oprah and often watch the show over dinner. (We don't have kids, so we're allowed to watch tv while we eat. And the tv is not literally over our dinner plates either — just in case you were wondering).

Today's episode featured two people who had tracked down others who shared the same name as themselves. One guy wrote a book about a man with the same name who had lived only a few blocks away in a tough neighborhood when they were boys. The similarities ended there as one guy ended up as a successful author and the other in prison.

Another fellow made a video of six others who shared his name. He travelled around the world to meet these folk individually, and they ended up meeting as a group in a town which shared their last name.

A somewhat similar experience once happened to me. Sort of.

One day I got an email from a guy in Australia who shared my full name, or at least the same first and last name. He also emailed several others with the same name. For a short while we had a little AC club, but it didn't last very long. There were two AC's from Australia: the mining engineer who wrote to me and an emergency/health worker. There was also a climatology professor from the USA. Interestingly (to me, at least) as a geographer (teacher) my field overlapped, at least tiny bit, with both the engineer and the climatologist. There were others, but that's the core group in my memory.

That was well over a decade ago, but even now, the originator and I occasionally correspond: a fact which came in very handy when a daffodil called Allyson made a trip to Australia. While backpacking through that country and using her credit card to pay most of her bills, the credit card company sent a renewal card to our house. On a certain date, the card that she had been using would become null and void in favor of the new card.

What to do? Allyson was travelling and had no mailing address, but she was heading up the eastern coast of Australia at the time toward Brisbane where this other AC lived. We contrived with that AC's approval to send the cards to his place and have Allyson the daffodil pick them up when she passed through.

It all worked out. They met. The daffodil Allyson got her card, and the Aussie AC even took her out for breakfast and a tramp through the rainforest.

So, that's what's in a name, or what was in the notable AC name at that time.

(Now you have a little more information about the daffodil called Allyson from last week's post. Not a lot: but you know she is my daughter and travelled to Australia. However, you should also know that I have been playing with you, and that she isn't really a daffodil — I was just making a dubious link to that other post. Sorry for driving you crazy. It's what I do best. Perhaps, there will be more to tell some other day.)