I’m Fixing To Pick Out a Name

I’m fixing to pick out a name.

Well, I was, but the Royal Brits beat me to it when they named the new little prince George. George Alexander Louis, to be exact.  I don’t know what his last name is. Do the Royal Brits have last names?

Sometimes they wait weeks before they name a royal baby, and I was hoping that would happen this time so a public frenzy would ensue while people speculated, demanded and wagered on what name would be bestowed on him. There would have been some great odds from the bookies and tons of money would have exchanged hands.

My Cousin Elroy was giving 100-to-one odds that they would name him Bubba or Jontavious, and he was terribly disappointed when they went ahead and named him and his betting scheme fizzled before it even got started.

According to the Social Security Administration the number one name for a boy during the first half of 2013, in the good old USA, was Jacob, and for a girl it was Sophia.

My momma liked to simplify things when it came to names.  The dog’s name was Dog, and the cat’s name was Cat.  As far as my three brothers and myself, she named us Ned, Fred, Ted and Jed, however, this rhyming simplification of name selection turned out to be a source of great confusion and consternation to her and a lot of other folks.

But not to me and my three brothers. I don’t remember much about the first three years of my life, but after that I remember everything with great clarity, including how we all four discovered the many advantages of having those rhyming names.

When one of us got into trouble it was not a difficult task to avoid the blame and punishment because we learned to say, “Uh, you must be thinking about Ned, Fred, Ted or Jed,” leaving off the name of the one being accused. And we didn’t blame each other for shifting the blame because we all did the same thing. It was almost like being twins, and even better in some ways because there were four of us.

When Fred was accused and deferred the accuser to Ned, Ned would tell them Fred meant to have said Ted, and when I was tracked down I would tell them that it had to be Jed, that they probably just misunderstood Fred.

After which Jed referred them back to Fred, and he would say, “Oh, no, I didn’t say Ned, I told you it was Jed, but maybe it was me who misunderstood, and it could be Ted.”

It didn’t take long for the accuser to shake their head in confusion and forget the whole thing.  The scheme we used is currently employed by the federal government. 

We did have some help along the way, from a real set of twins, on how to get into mischief and avoid the consequences.  We had these older double first-cousin twins named Steve and Cleve.  They looked so much alike that they couldn’t tell each other apart, but were masters of childhood deception.

My brothers and I liked it when Steve and Cleve came to visit.  They told us the facts of life while we were shooting marbles, but I couldn’t tell which one of them did most of the telling.  I think it was Steve.

Yes, my poor momma lived to regret bestowing those rhyming names on us.  Sometimes when she had a task to be done she couldn’t remember if it was Ned, Fred, Ted or Jed she wanted, and would just call out for one of us, and of course, when none of us showed up and when we were being chastised later, Ned would say, “I thought you called Fred,” and Fred would say, “I thought you called Ted,” and I would say, “I thought you called Jed.”  And of course Jed would start it all over by saying, “I thought you said Ned.”

I’ve decided those Royal Brits are pretty smart and will avoid any confusion of which of their children is the source of devilment, they do this by fixing to give them all three first names.