A baby by any other name....

"I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought."
-- Shakespeare, Henry IV

My college roommate swears he went to high school with a boy named Bobby Buttsavage. I don't really believe him, as he tends to the literary, and is not beyond embellishment when a laugh is at stake. Still, Bobby Buttsavage lies so far to the outrageous that I wonder what the catalyzing truth might have been. Was he a Robert Arschwild who fell in with the wrong group of boys? A Bob Bummel whose surname withered under the twin onslaught of 'bum' and 'pummel'? Whatever the truth, the story continues to stand as a stern warning to choose names with caution.

Historically, I have ignored this warning. For years I maintained a mental list of outrageous potential names for my (ever so unlikely) firstborn. Actually, calling it a 'list' is an exaggeration: what I maintained was a ritual wherein whenever I would stumble across a name that was sufficiently rare, difficult, ridiculous, or exotic, I would gleefully swear on all that was holy to bestow it on my firstborn male child. I accrued a fluid register of great Russian patriarchs, 18th century sybarites, eastern European poets, gunsmen, taxistas, hillbillies, flower children, Benedictine monks, Finish sportsmen, celebrity hitmen, and ruined cult leaders. In retrospect, the pleasure of this ritual sprang as much from delight in raw phonetics as from a perverse affinity for what was marginal, improbable, and unexpected. The rush in letting a name like Jakeldroski Fetiomerkiovitch roll glibly off the tongue was not just the thrill of glottal control but also the host of associations it ushered in, the Dostievskian heros, the blackclad revolutionaries, the besotted holy loner poets groaning under the injuries of the state. The roots of my penchant for impossible names lay deep in an unconscious and perhaps unsustainable exoticism.

So great was my fame for horrible names that when Piro materialized the pressue to produce an appropriate lollywhopper of a moniker was almost overwhelming. For months, Catalina and I kept a Google spreadsheet of candidates, divided into three columns, from left to right in order of 'serviceability'. Oh nest of horrors! Which readers of Genesis rember Uz the patriarch, progenitor of Buz? Uz Buz Toews was high on the list. And then there was the impeccable Indalecio, a lullaby of a name, simultaneously suggesting indolence and lo necio, or 'the bad' (not to mention the fact that in practice we would probably cut of the head and tale to leave just 'Dale', whose meaning in Spanish is 'go ahead', 'your turn', or 'give them hell', depending on how liberally you choose to translate.) I was very partial to names with strong cultural resonance, names like Schlomo, Gunther, and Mustafa, while Catalina tended to the resonant, like Facundo, Sinforoso, and Celedonio. (Sinforoso was from Francisco, who also suggested Cosme and Aparicio as 'nombres de la familia'.) If anyone is interested in the complete list, they can find it at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dg3bm7vx_16hd89msg7, though be warned that these names are a siren song: the more you look at them, the more you begin to ask yourself 'why couldn't I give that name to my kid?' Trust yourself. Don't do it.

Curiously, we both ended up being rather conservative, I more so than my wife. I originally plumped for Walter; she vetoed that for Balthazar; Benjamin was a compromise that we both loved and felt appropriate for this big, beautiful, beloved boy. Last name was originally open to debate, but after a tearful conversation with her mother, who implored her, in mild histerics, not to do that 'to her' (implication: bastard child!) Catalina decided the battle wasn't worth fighting and settled for Toews. The middle name was a battle ground: I plumped for Emil, Catalina wanted Cosme. We hemmed and hawed. The family began rattling the cage, demanding a handle for the boy, tired, they said, of calling him Baby Zoogle, outraged, they claimed, that a week had passed, nervous, they affirmed, that he might not be named before the Baptism. Finally I cracked. Cosme, same root as cosmos, the Greek principle of order that is the core task of the both the artist and the philosopher. Cosme, the star gazer, the child who needed to be dragged from the womb with forceps because his head was tilted back in wonderous awe as he gazed at the stars in my woman's interior. Cosme, the baby who insisted on making an appearance, in spite of seven forms of birth control and a five year plan that pencilled him in at the very end. This improbable being is my son, this 10 pound puchero king from out of nowhere, this monster who came facing the sun, this purple conehead who in ten days has had a swollen nipple, infant acne, diaper rash, gained a pound and a half, run through 73 diapers, cooed, snuffled, and begun to smile: this amazing creature is Benjamin Cosme Toews.