Baby

The tale of a little girl’s life: some of the names and facts have been changed to protect the innocent.

I was born on the hottest day of 1952 in the Naval Hospital in Oakland. My college roommate Kim was born there the year before, and she told me the Navy required patients to change their own sheets. I was a great sheet-changer by the time I was five, and I realized at that moment that my uncanny ability to make perfect hospital corners and bounce quarters on the bed came not only from my father, but also from my mother. I jotted this down in my secret mommy book, where I kept all information about her. Then I made my bed with hospital corners on all sides, and took to sleeping on the top with an untidy quilt around me, definitely NOT tucked in. I might have to remake the bed sometime, but I damn well wasn’t going to do it THIS month… My roommates thought I was crazy (and I privately agreed, since I couldn’t figure out what made me do it), but it wasn’t as nutty as Kim’s sleepwalking, which frequently ended with her collecting all our pillows and dumping them in the shower while chanting mathematical formulae.

Mom’s name was Dawn, and the only name changes she endured focused on the end, so when she was adopted, she became Dawn Shawn (isn’t that too perfect?) and when she married Daddy, she became Dawn Watt, which people often pronounced, “Done what?” Not very inventive.

My dad’s family, on the other hand, took nicknaming seriously. Grandma named dad and his twin brother Lawrence and Benjamin. These names either connected in a way she never told anyone, or perhaps she was too tired to come up with anything better. The twins were numbers four and five, and she was only twenty-three. Her three toddlers called them Lair and Bear (pronounced weawh and beawh, due to a family trait of having difficulties with L’s and R’s). The minute they bounced outside, however, the neighbor kids re-dubbed them. Grandma would poke her head outside, calling, “LawRENCE…BENjamin.” Naturally, they became Rent and Bent outside, and Went and Bent inside. Think about it: Went Watt, which eventually became Rent Rot when his schoolmates went overboard… This is a load to bear.

Everyone at home called my brother Kody during his toddling years, even though his name was Lawrence Jr. They began with Lawrence Jr., which became LJ, which turned into Jay, then Blue Jay, then Blue. A neighbor kid called him Blue Poo-poo one day. Grandma, thinking quick, told him they were referring to Winnie the Pooh, and spent the afternoon reading him stories about the Hundred Acre Wood. Now, he had a long love of bears, just as I adored tigers, and we’d been playing Bear and Tiger in the long grass of the backyard for as long as we remembered. He didn’t think much of a teddy bear, however, and that night had a serious chat with Daddy about bears. When Daddy got to grizzlies, my brother almost became Grizz, but then Daddy told him about Kodiaks. Wow. The neighbor kids still called him Blue Poo, but only if they were on the other side of the fence and had a running start. By the time he started school, the addition of his last name made him Blewatt, then Bluto, which stuck. Not that he physically resembled Popeye’s nemesis: no, he was a skinny lad. Back to this later, but if I tell you he spent recess of his first day in kindergarten in the boys’ restroom, clogging all the toilets and sinks with toilet paper and towels, and then flushing like crazy until the flood burst down the hallway, you’ll get an idea of the little sociopath emerging.

My mother named me, simply gathering up her very best friends and honoring them: Cassandrealizziebev-Alicingrideniskate (Cassie, Andrea, Lizzie, Bev, Alice, Ingrid, Denise, Kate). My brother took one look at me and said, “Baby.” Thereafter, if anyone called me anything else, he screamed, kicked, threw whatever was handy and wouldn’t quit until they said, “Baby.” With him to underline it, Baby stuck for good, and I consider it the finest gift poor Bluto ever gave me.