Terry Marotta:
Names Have a Way of Making Things Personal

I think I love my church most because of how personal the services are. When people ask prayers for someone, they tell that person’s name—his first name anyway—so that when we go to pray together we can lift that one up by name, and it feels so great to me—as if we’re just boosting him up that much closer to Heavenly oversight.

Over time, this practice of making things personal has become so familiar to me that now whenever someone tells me something about a friend or cousin or colleague, I always ask for the name. 

Not surprisingly, my kids do this too. When they were young and would come home from school, they would talk and talk about their classmates, and always they would tell those children’s names.

Thus when I was cleaning out a closet in the bedroom once used by our oldest girl and came upon a First Place medal for Varsity Fencing in a bent old shoe box, I immediately recognized the name of the boy who had won it.

Even though I had never met him.

I knew that he had fenced, and finished high school in three years’ time, and gone off to college early.  

For months I kept thinking about him, because I wanted to look him up. I wanted to tell him we still had his medal. 

I wanted to do this because it moved me to think that, not once but many times, the thing had been chosen for saving when that closet had been cleaned and recleaned over the years. It moved me to think that it had been chosen for saving repeatedly, and by different family members, when so much around it had been tossed, gym shorts, tennis shoes, CD cases covered in dust.

 Finally, I could resist no longer. I went to my computer and started looking, and within 20 minutes I was pretty sure I had found him, street address and all.

But what I really wanted was an email address, so I could in that courteous and non-intrusive way ask, "Is this you?" and tell him about his medal.

It took me almost an hour but I finally found an email address, associated with a scholarly paper produced by him in adulthood.

I wrote him and he wrote right back.

 He had not seen my daughter since they were both 15, but what I learned about his own little daughter so delighted me I have to tell about it here:

One day she was playing with her collection of straight pins, which she likes to plunge into the upholstery. When someone gave her some buttons to add to her enjoyment, she immediately skewered them with her pins. "Look, they’re wearing backpacks!" she said with satisfaction.

Another day she saw some ducks and began galloping toward them. Not surprisingly, the birds hurried away. "I’m teaching them to run!" she exclaimed in hot pursuit.

Once her mother asked her permission to do something but alas she had to decline.

"No you may can’t," she told her in queenly fashion.

I learned these things from the little website this two-year-old’s parents use to record these stories and pass them on to friends and family, and will close with a last example of the payoff that came my way for listening for a name and then remembering it:

When asked to take hands with another, whether for a game or just on busy sidewalks, this little girl takes her own hands and clasps them firmly before her, a sweet metaphor about being your own best friend that we might ALL do well to learn from and remember.

Write Terry at terry@terrymarotta.
com or PO Box 270, Winchester, Mass.,  01890.