Name Troubles

Growing up, I often wished that I had an easier last name.  My last name is two words.  That’s weird enough, but to make matters worse, the first word “von” starts with a lowercase letter.  My first grade teacher, Mrs. Garwood, was a really nice lady, but she was very proper and liked to follow rules.  She told me I was wrong when I told her that my name had a small v at the beginning.  “I’m sorry, honey, that’s not right.  All names begin with a capital letter.  It’s a rule.”  So, I guess I was already breaking rules when I was in first grade. 

Sometimes, though, some funny things happened with the lowercase thing.  My mother once ordered some pencils for my sister’s birthday.  My sister’s a bit of a stickler for details, so my mom really wanted the pencils to have the name spelled correctly.  She made a special point to tell the pencil makers that it was important that the first letter of the last name be a lowercase letter.  She put in a special note to the printer.  “Note:  lowercase v, please.”    I guess the pencil printer people were good at reading directions, because they stuck to the directions, even though most people with common sense would know that it would look ridiculous.  It hadn’t occurred to my mom that the pencil company always used only capital letters.  

They made an exception for my mom, of course, so my sister, the stickler, received personalized pencils that looked like this:

FROM THE DESK OF:  BARBARA vON EULER

Here’s another thing about my name.  We always have to spell it for people.  From a very early age, I learned to recite the letters of my last name in the way that my father said it over the phone.  He always said the same thing:  “V as in Victor, O – N as in Nancy-capital E-U-L-E-R.”  I’ve said that so many times that I think I will be saying it even when I’m 90 years old and can’t remember my name or what I ate for breakfast.  

It seems like our name is particularly incompatible with computers.  They hate our name.  For one thing, they don’t know how to handle the space.  Computers don’t like blank spaces.  Computer forms seem to tolerate hyphens, now, like Zeta-Jones or Smth-Schuster, but spaces, that’s too much for them.  So, whenever we go somewhere, and the person has to look us up on the computer, we have to say to the person, “It could be all one word voneuler, or it could be with a capital, like Voneuler, or it could be just ‘von’ because the computer lost interest when they got to the space.”  Sometimes, the computer thinks that the “von” is my middle name, so they have us filed in the computer as just Euler.  Then they call me Mr. Euler.  

One time, though, a computer decided to have a little fun at my mom’s expense.  I guess the computer program was aware that “von” is a prefix for a name, so, this computer decided that it would spit out a mailing label that had not just the “von” prefix, but all of the other name prefixes that it could find in its special prefix word bank.  The envelope we received gave us another way to address my mom.  It said, “To:  Mrs. Mary von de di Mc La Du,” all of the good prefixes rolled into one name.  I don’t know why they left off the other ones, like Fitz and O’ and van, but still, every once in a while it’s fun to call my mom “Mrs. von-de-di-Mc-la-du.”

I suppose this is all rather insignificant, except that as a child, and I guess well into adulthood, I had to accept that my name made me different.  There were definitely days when I longed for a name like Jones or Smith, something short, simple, and immediately recognizable.  Then again, I have come to realize that names are another way of being an individual.  They are both a blessing and a burden at the same time.  I imagine, for instance, that the Joe Smiths of the world sometimes jones for a way to stand out.  Sure, they don’t receive preposterous pencil parcels or the perplexing plethora of prefixes, but every once in a while, I bet they wish that they weren’t getting phone calls looking for one of the other 100 Joe Smiths in New York. I just looked up Peter von Euler online in the Connecticut White Pages.  Two entries appeared. Both for me. 

Both misspelled. 

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