the heat is on

in every sense of the phrase.

it's like 0 degrees out there. probably less. centigrades, that is.

so indoors, the heat is on.

i have to send steve, flo and franco my two "finished" drafts--the intro and chapter 1--this friday. so the heat is on (o-woo-oh-oh, o-woo-oh-oh, baby can you feel it!?)

and my mother and husband have changed the name of my baby-in-belly and now call her, Aitana. naming the unborn child is relatively important, and having sort of fallen into the notion that she had a name and that it was Sabrina, to now find that there are still open possibilities out there, means that we shall not simply "fall into" the name, but actually pick it. so the heat is on.

who sang that, anyway?

the thing is (still) that i think of sabrina, sabri, as an airy, light, charming girl. girl, in my mind's eye, from the age of 9 months to, say 3. then again from like 9 to 11; sabrina in those ages is a fun child. she is a happy young adult, sort of, thus named. the name gives me no more clues as to her adolescence, and between 4 and 9 there's this unknown, unknowable period. before 9 months there's not much there to be this or that. just life. but as an adult, my adult daughter--when i am a middle-aged and then old woman--may not be aptly named sabrina. she cannot be light and airy and charming as an adult: she will have been raised in my home, by ig and me, with her older half-brother, in burgos, spain. it is practically impossible for her to retain "sabrinaness" throughout her life.

this worries me, people, because unlike the wise native american groups in the wild midwest and west and east and wherever it was they were, whose names changed as a person aged and changed, in our culture you are stuck with your name forever. and there are names that i have readily dismissed because they do not sound right for anybody under the age of 50--but then again, there are those other names that do not sound right for some people over the age of 30. is sabrina one of these names, at least, in our daughter's case?

this is a serious matter that i had recognized in the back of my mind, but had not confronted directly. now, the possibility of this other, more serious name, forces me to Think (the heat is on). because Aitana is a totally different name from Sabrina. i mean, obviously it's a different name. but i mean, it's Totally different.

Aitana does not name a charming, smiling, happy girl, a charming, witty, sharp-eyed young woman... that's what Sabrina, Sabri, does. Aitana names a more serious person, a deep person, a darker person, a more profound person.

how much of us is shaped by our name? the immediate answer would be, "very little." it doesn't seem possible that, being given a particular name, a person ends up with certain ways which, under a different name, he or she would not have ended up having... but hey, a name is a word and words are powerful. a word puts together a series of sounds, and images, it orders sounds and it orders these squiggles we call letters, and assigns this orderly, repeated, institutionalized Sound/Image to One. Susana. Ethan. Yesenia. Ruth. Ignacio. Sabrina. Aitana. Ellen. we should not underestimate the power of such a naming sound, such a naming image. we see it or hear it, and think, that's me. in school, the teacher pronounces it, and it's you. it's written down somewhere, and it's you. names can have heavy sounds. or they can look frightening. they can make you feel, seem, older than you are. or younger. i hated my name for a long time. it felt totally wrong. it still sometimes feels like it does not totally fit, like there is something extra--it does not lack something, it has too much of something.

i do think that there is some, however small, influence. and before the child is born and is totally under our crazy influence, beyond our control, i would like to try to have all these other details that provide tiny, probably meaningless and irrelevant, influences, under control. these we can deal with now, these i can try to make right. the heat, as you can see, is on.

because you can probably tell that i would rather have a Sabrina than an Aitana. but, that is, only if she is indeed Sabrina, and not misnamed as such. if she is named Sabrina, but at the age of 28, is nowhere near the name... then that will be because she will actually be near the other name, Aitana. the more serious woman.

serious, not necessarily depressed. just like sabrina, at that age, can be high-strung and highly energetic, not necessarily happy.

Aitana: beautiful, profound, dark blues, blacks, oceans, mountains.

Sabrina: light, charming, smiles, whites, feathers, tickles, joy, giggles.

what do do?