On Being Heather

They’re turning up more and more often these days, this new crop of Heathers. They’ll be wearing their name tags at the check-out line at the store, or sitting behind their name plaque on the reception desk. That’s how I know who they are, and how many of them there are.

You see, I’m a Heather. But I go back to when I was THE Heather. No other one in school, or in the small towns I grew up in, or at any stores anywhere. I never in fact met another one until junior high, when friends of friends of the family invited my folks to their home in some unremembered part of the state for some unremembered event. Unremembered, that is, except for the fact that they had their own Heather.

The only thing I remember about her except for the name was that she was better at finding agates in the dirt than I was. It’s not that I wasn’t always looking, for one even the size of the head of a hat pin was a find, just as precious as finding a penny, which I also always looked for. Maybe their driveway was just a better spot to look for them. Anyway, after the event, we went our separate ways and never looked back.

But now I knew I wasn’t really the only one.

Mom told us that she had tried to find unique names for her children. My brother was part of the vanguard of the baby boom, following my dad’s return from WWII. She looked and looked and finally decided that “Stephen” was unique enough. Unfortunately for her, so did about a million other parents at the same time. When it was my turn, she picked out “Heather”. This time it worked.

I never thought it was a gift. All around me were Lindas and Judys and Susans and Nancys and Carols and Alices. Nobody had to figure out how to pronounce their names, or ask over and over how they were spelled. And being unique, way too many people found it hilarious to mispronounce it “Weather” or “Feather” or “Heather Featherbed”, which young boys found particularly gleeful. By far the worst was the singsong chant by the 13-year-old boy that I had fallen head-over-heels in love with at the tender age of 11, the first time I ever knew boys actually existed, really knew. Even more humiliating was everyone around taking it up in the mocking way kids do. “Heather-feather, giggle-wiggle, cha-cha-cha!” I don’t think that ever went away until the family moved down to St. Paul.

I still remember it.

In high school there was another Heather, and through the years there was a sprinkling of others, but we were rare. The name began to be more special, as the people around me grew up and became more polite. I had always known it meant a flower (weed, my brother insisted) on the Scottish moors. Our family recognized the Scottish ancestry more than the other mixed-in nationalities, and I came to feel I rightly “owned” my name. One year heather actually showed up in the local stores, and I brought a pot home and promptly killed it, though not deliberately. Another few years later I received a name bookmark as a gift, and it was defined in meaning as “joyful spirit”. Hmmm, cool. It was getting better and better.

Then Heather Locklear became famous, and suddenly it seemed that every third baby girl was named “Heather”. I experienced more than twice the weird event of minding my own business shopping in a store when suddenly I would hear a yell, “Heather! Quit that and get back here!” or, “Heather, put that down!”, or,”Heather, shame on you!” Each time, it would cause me to startle, look around, and wonder what on earth I had been doing this time.... Oh wait, they didn’t mean me. I wasn’t still that kid, and this wasn’t my mother, no matter how well they imitated THAT VOICE, the one that promised instant consequences in no uncertain terms, the one that saw and knew everything, the one that must be obeyed.

Whew!

Not me, not this time.

Whew!

It always had been of course, being the only one in my particular universe with my name. But finally, not now. I could pull myself back together, continue shopping, and feel sorry both for the little girl of long ago who seemed to always be in trouble, and for whichever little girl was in trouble now.

It’s taken some getting used to, wearing a common, ordinary name, finally. I get a bit of a kick out of folks who know only my name and make assumptions about my age and interests, though if they’re telemarketers, my amusement doesn’t delay one bit my hanging up on them. And when I see another Heather, I feel that momentary impulse to blurt out that I’m one too. I’m learning to hold back. It used to mean something. Nowadays, they just wouldn’t get it.