On a Sunday with a rich summer weekend rolling to an end, I guess all I’ve really got is my name. My small first name, a little lyrical, a little biblical. In Hebrew, some say my name means “bitter.” It’s hard to tell. My name, you see, hasn’t always been spelled by this way, and, by always, I mean the royal always of eternity and not the personal always of my life. There have been various incarnations of my name, and one or two of them meant “bitter” in Hebrew.
But my name is my grandmother’s name. She was German, mostly, a little French with broad farm wife hands, steady movements and a smile that nearly always looked surprised. She was Marie. I am Marie. Though I was not there to see it and too drunk when I heard the story later to remember it, I believe she passed away peacefully about a decade ago, knowing her time had come.
The middle name belonged to a host of other women before it got to me. My father’s mother was named Mary-Louise. So I got Louise, a cut off form, dangling and missing its predecessor. It makes sense that I would have be given that as my middle name. Mary-Louise, I’m told, gave me my bone structure. On a wall above an old phone in a house that isn’t mine anymore, I saw the sole picture of her that I know to exist, and I haven’t seen it in half my life’s time. I have good memory, ripped with detail. If I were to stand and face that photo today, I would see myself wholly. But that’s where it would have stopped. A bullet stopped just behind her head in the headboard and left her lifeless. This was long before my time. And, I’m told my father began his stuttering then.
The last name is harder, more mythic than anything. As with all other facts about my family and I, its history was a matter of debate. My father believes that everyone with the name Slayton is genetically linked and that we all come from the same Slayton guy who crossed the great eastern pond with the Mayflower. How true this is, I can’t say. That story came from my father, a man who claimed to have been wounded in battle in Vietnam and left with a giant scar from hot shrapnel on his upper arm. It turns out that a shelf fell on him while he was moving some files one day; perhaps it was just a problem of interpretation of the word “battle.” So I don’t know about the Mayflower. But I know my name is easy to say and easy to remember and I’ve never met another Slayton. One founded a town in Southern Minnesota, called Slayton, Minnesota, miles and states from where my father grew up. Luck would have it that my mother grew up IN Slayton, MN miles and states from where my father grew up AS a Slayton. Luck is funny, a real comedic genius. And that’s my Slayton-ness.
And that’s what I have. My name.
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