But after a week of fitful sleep, dreamscapes and nightmares of lists and catalogs, the constant fretful consideration of nomenclature, etymologies, ancestries, astrologies, and the like, I came up with absolute zilch! Nothing sounded quite right. Nothing sounded personal. Nothing looked me right in the eye and said, “Hey you with the buck teeth and the feathered hair and the stitches in your lip and the corduroys tight-rolled in your tube socks, here I am, first name, middle name, last name, I’m all yours!” Nothing! What a cosmic tragedy! What a waste of fate! My parents were baffled: how could their mouthy, precocious, spiteful youngest child pass up such an opportunity? I shrugged my shoulders and resigned myself to the same silly foreign name, a sequence of odd letters stitched together like a crazy quilt, easily misspelled, misread, mispronounced, teased and squeezed and tickled and jabbed at during recess...