New Food Tuesday

Rich and I have been working on branching out in our restaurant choices these days. So we created New Food Tuesday to encourage us to go somewhere new. Tuesday is great because most places are open but aren't busy. And if we strike out, there's always cereal at the house. Tonight was Catch 31 in the Hilton Oceanfront hotel. Rich says that the two things people remember the most about restaurants are the restrooms and the bread. The restrooms were great with very modern sinks and the bread was very tasty (although the butter was flavored, which I could have done without). Our meals, however, were only moderately good. I ordered a variety of shellfish and most of them felt like they still had sand in them. The highlight was our waitress, who was fantastic. Attentive without being intrusive. If we were guaranteed to get her again, I would definitely go back.

But all of this is to lead up to our walk down the boardwalk. I absolutely love going for walks with Rich. Even though we were both tired and it was starting to get chilly, I was so glad to stroll around with him. You can see some of the highlights on Flickr.

Good help is hard to find

I had a very good Mothers Day. Highlights include not having to go out to a fancy brunch or drive all the way to Richmond. I simply called Mom to tell her I had peonies in my back yard for her and offered to buy her things at CostCo while I was out. The Puddin' went to Fight Club over in Newport News somewhere and I opted to do a giant pile of laundry and go to the grocery store. I went to three grocery stores while the Puddin' was away and I confess to walking up and down every aisle in Farm Fresh at a relatively leisurely pace. It was blissful.

I got back in time for the rain to stop and for Dad to show up with his gardening tools. My parents' yard, while very large, has gotten quite shady over the years with all the huge trees. Consequently, it's hard to find a place for Dad to grow his tomatoes. So I have worked out a deal with my parents to let them share crop a section of my yard in exchange for some tomatoes. As my father said in his e-mail asking permission, "have roto-tiller, will travel."

I am one of the world's worst gardeners, mostly from lack of time, experience or knowledge about how to make plants go. I've toyed with the idea of starting a garden or even an herb box, but it never pans out. The rules of my gardening method are heavily based on neglect. So it's nice to look out into my yard and see a plot started and watch it grow and live vicariously through my father's labors.

Dad's gardening is more than just putting plants in the soil and watering them. He had to cut back a mulberry bush that was overtaking my fence (and would have shaded some of his tomatoes). He also had to build a low fence to keep Sarah from bedding down in the freshly tilled soil while still being short enough to step over (which involved trimming the fence down to the right height). Then there were the decisions on how many plants to put in the ground and how close together to plant them. The entire time, he lamented that he should have planted them earlier and they would have grown better.

Part of me felt bad for not going out and helping Dad plant. I kept forgetting that this was his gardening project and I'm just providing soil and water. I did go out a few times to check on him and stayed as he finished up his planting. Then I remembered what it takes to be a helper for my father. It works best if you just listen for a while. He has interesting things to talk about and I always learn something new, even if it's not about gardening. The bed was mostly done, but we were racing the next thunderstorm coming along as well as nightfall. There was more lamenting about exactly how much fertilizer to mix in and how deep to plant them and if he had a powered post-hole digger, he could do all kinds of things. I started to help plant but realized that was just futile. He nudged the plants around inches at a time and fiddled with the dirt around the stalks.

As Dad made his way down the row, he had starter pots left lying around from the plants he'd transferred into the ground. I picked them up and stacked them loosely together (so they wouldn't cement together with the potting soil). I filled the top one with bits of trash to walk over to the trash can once we were done. Dad was so engrossed in what he's doing he absently mentioned he wanted to save those pots and he'd throw out the trash. Roger that, Dad, we're on the same page. He then took the three pots that I had stacked, pulled them apart and placed the three remaining full pots inside them. So instead of three full pots and a stack of three empty pots, he had three full pots each with an empty one under it.

It can be frustrating to help Dad because a lot of times I feel like whatever I'm doing is a waste since he's going to do his own thing anyways. But those moments are usually outnumbered by the times he moves down the planting row and I move the potting soil container closer to him as he goes without him having to ask. I understand that at a point the effort of asking for something so simple or explaining every little detail becomes more trouble than just getting it yourself. If you have a good helper who can read minds, then your project can be greatly improved by the extra help. It's just exhausting to be that helper, sometimes.

I had a "Dad moment" today when I got all annoyed at Rich for not putting hooks in the ceiling where I wanted them. He put them eight feet apart but they ideally needed to be 8'4" apart to be exactly lined up. The chains holding up the screen make up the difference, but it's not exactly at the ceiling where I wanted it and we'd have to make another two holes in the ceiling two inches to the outside of the current hooks to raise the entire screen approximately three inches higher when it is already more than two feet longer than we need. I had to remind myself that no one else will notice or care about the way it's hung. But I could feel the compulsiveness rising up in my throat and I couldn't even look at the screen without being annoyed.

While my father and I were out in the yard, I asked him if they still made the low wheelbarrow he was using for potting soil (only about a foot off the ground, wide and shallow). He said he hasn't seen them in years and Mom had bought theirs years ago. Back when she had bought them he'd criticized it - and Mom for spending the money on them - because he didn't appreciate how much more useful they were. As we were packing up the van to beat the rain, he rolled his little cart into the side door of the van and flipped it inside with one hand. He smiled at me and said, "a full-sized wheelbarrow wouldn't have fit." I smiled back and completely understood.

A Genie by any other name ...

The bliss of being betrothed has not faded in the least. But there has been a bit of angst over it. Rich admitted to me months ago that he was thinking that if we were to get married and if I were to take Surname[1] and keep Punky[2] as a middle name my initials would be GPS and that would be pretty cool. He looked abashed as if I had caught him writing our names in a spiral bound notebook.

I told him that those initials would be cool, but was pretty non-committal about the whole thing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take his last name. Really, I wasn’t sure what I would want to do.

So a few weeks ago, it became more kosher to talk about these things with our friends and it’s been fascinating to hear everyone’s opinions. My parents have steadfastly not cared at all what name I have as long as I’m happy. When my oldest brother was a kid, my father said it would be easier for he and Mom to change their last name to Doug’s last name (and the name of Mom’s ex-husband) than to change Doug's to my father's last name. My father is the most hip individual of any generation ever.

There were several friends who assumed I would change my name to Rich’s upon marriage. I can’t blame them as I have a track record of changing my name when Jeremy and I were married. Hell, most of my utilities, my social security card and my passport are still in that name. Obviously, I didn’t salt the earth when it came to changing back to my birth name after the divorce.

Divorce also taught me that the world doesn’t really care what your name is. It helped that Punky was my middle name so it showed up on my driver’s license and other documents. But I have credit cards that say both Genevieve and Genie and no one seems to question my identity. My signature is illegible for the most part anyways, but even on my current debit card it has Genevieve A Punky and my current picture on it but my old married signature permanently printed on the front “for added security.” It doesn’t seem to matter that the signature on the back now doesn’t match the one on the front. The world really doesn’t care.

So I was renewed with a sense of individuality. I have two names now. Really, I have three or four if you count nicknames. And while one of those names doesn’t apply to me anymore, it’s still a part of me. I’m pleased that I’m a Punky. My family’s farm is on Punky Road in North Carolina. It’s easy enough to say and spell. It’s my father’s name and I associate it with all the sub-culture of our family. It’s what makes me take things off of other people’s trash and yell at fast food workers who don’t wash their hands and worry over diamond mines in other countries and give money to strangers who need help. Being a Punky is a huge part of me.

But for those of you who have paid attention to my moniker in this forum, my middle name is pretty important to me as well. I worried over “losing” it when Jeremy and I got married. And that loss is a large part of why I chose GenieAlisa as my online name. My parents worked really hard to pick a pretty awesome name for me and it would be a shame for it to disappear.

And so now we’re in 2006 and I’m fretting over what my name should be after Rich and I get married. I made a fucking Pro/Con list on paper, for Christ’s sake. And as I sat writing this list I realized that if I had so many reservations about it, shouldn’t that be a sign that I didn’t really want to change my name?

So I started mentally preparing myself to remain a Punky. It’s entertaining to have waiters and cashiers call Rich Mr. Punky and I didn’t want to go through changing my name if I was going to mourn the loss of Alisa or Punky or regret it.

Rich has his name tattooed on his arm and is a junior to his father, so the idea of him changing his name was not really an option. Besides, Surname is a pretty kick ass name, so who wouldn’t want it? Oh, that’s right, I might not want it.

The only other Mrs. Surnames I’ve known are his mother who doesn’t make the best role model and … yeah, that one and only ex-wife and ex-friend. Not a great streak so far.

I turned to Wikipedia for ideas on traditions in various cultures regarding name changes. Let me tell you, that was not a good idea. One of the entries mentioned the woman traditionally surrendering her last name in favor of the man’s last name. Surrender? Ugh, I think I’m going to puke.

So the next day I was in the garage with my friends and the topic came up. My male friends (all of whom have their names in mint condition) told me that they thought the husband and wife should have the same last name. There were words like “tradition” and “commitment” bantered around. My dear friend, Mr. Smith, made statements that it seemed weird to him for a wife not to have her husband’s last name. But in keeping with most conversations we have, he also told me that his blanket statements about what’s right and wrong don’t apply to me since I’m his perennial exception to the rule. Thanks … I think. But the part that really disturbed me was the idea that if a wife didn’t take her husband’s last name she wasn’t committed to the relationship. As if getting married wasn’t enough. Wow. Just. Fucking. Wow.

So all that stewed in my head and my gut for hours and hours. I make fun of Colin for over-analyzing lots of things in life, but I am myself the reigning champ of over-think. What does the world think? Do I care what the world thinks? Am I happy or sad about all of this? Do I want to just tell the world to go to hell and change my name to some unpronounceable symbol?

Rich and I snuggled up for bed that night and I tried to go to sleep. But over-think was in over-drive and I couldn’t turn my brain off. I lied there worrying about having to choose a name to give up in order to take Rich’s. It was like saying I had to cut off one of my hands, but if I played my cards right, I could pick which hand to cut off and could then replace it with some hand that Rich gave me. And then I started worrying that if I kept my current name would I start to feel isolated from the rest of our (hypothetical and non-existent except for pets) family as it started to expand? Would we hyphenate our kids’ names and doom them to strange initials and complicated alphabetization? Which voting line is the shortest in our neighborhood? What if there were some disaster and we were assigned lifeboats by last name? I want to be in Rich’s boat!

About that time, tears started streaming down my face and I attempted to quietly sob into Rich’s armpit so as not to keep him awake while I decided my future in the dark at 1am. Needless to say, Rich wasn’t sleeping and promised we would talk about it on Sunday and sort it all out and that he loved me with any name and I could call myself whatever I wanted and nothing changes. I blubbered something about life boats and surrendering and somewhere in all that I fell asleep.

Sunday brought a new day and much optimism for my project of “Pin the Last Name on the Genie” for the three hour ride home. Even just knowing that I could do whatever I wanted and that Rich would support whatever I chose gave me a lot of encouragement. He is a very very cool guy, indeed.

After pondering my options, I have decided to keep all of my names and add Rich’s on at the end for good measure, giving me four names. Upon marriage, my new name will be Genevieve (Genie) Alisa Punky Surname. I will be in his lifeboat and I won’t surrender anything and I’ll still be my Daddy’s girl and I’ll still be GenieAlisa. In a matter of 12 hours I went from tears and angst to excitement about adding some “flare” to my current name. And no matter what the world calls me, so long as it’s not Gigi or Jenny or Jamie (?!) it will be My Name ™. I will be the scourge of Scantron bubble forms.

[1] and [2] – Surname and Punky are not our real last names. Although, that would be pretty cool.