A year or so ago I stopped into the little convenience store in my home town, and ran into an old school mate I had not seen in several years. Roman and I never got along, and as I recall I did my 12 year old best to kill him, or break his face, on numerous occasions. Since we parted ways at the end of 5th grade, he and I had been somewhat civil but it had been a good two years since we’d spoken last. He saw me before I saw him, and all he said was my name. Along with a quick flip of the head and a slight grin of camaraderie, but with the edge to it that is in all Roman’s actions. Something in his pig eyes says everything I will ever need to know about him. But that one word, loud and clear, while my brain was still trying to set a name to his face – And I have changed more than he – threw me for a complete loop. More to the point, it completely threw my Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA) loop into a tail-spin. I didn’t like it. In fact, I vowed to do it to him the very next time I saw him, and so I did. This incident left me with the urge to write a post here about the power of names, but I never quite got around to it.
The power of names is a strong one, and being able to name someone is important. It can give you power over them to know their name and use it, or them power over you to not let you know it. It can give you a bond, to know and use one another’s names familiarly. Names have power, they are how we identify those around us. In much myth, it is the naming of an evil which either gives it its power, calls it forth, or gives the person speaking the name a power over the evil being named.
I work and am active in an industry which has a pretty high washout rate. It is brutal, and filled with misdeeds by people of questionable character, or serious personal flaws, and corporate back-biting, company in-fighting, etc. Friendships that are forged are often sundered, particularly if the friendships had anything to do with partnerships. It’s a wicked business, and those in it are surrounded by the bones of the fallen, and the waiting machinery of their own demise. Its incredibly worthwhile, on many levels, and I enjoy it a great deal and would not do another type of art for all the money in the world, but I recognize that it I simply a rough industry.
I have been involved with this industry and community for a number of years, since I was a young man still in high school. I have made good friends, and good mentors, on this road, and am fortunate to still have most of them and only a very short list of actual enemies (just enough to remind me I am doing something right). I have, however, lost touch with many of those I called friend, who gave me guidance when I was a younger man just entering the world of being an adult.
One of those individuals, the founder and original proprietor of a small, but innovative, company, I haven’t spoken with in a couple years now. I was around at the time she began to develop her idea and her company, and we had a small level of communication in regards to that. I stayed in touch, and became one of her customers, and she and I spoke on a more personal basis on occasion there after. In particular I recall spending a few hours talking on the phone one thanksgiving, after the turkey was eaten, the pumpkin pie demolished, and all that. I sat in my yard, way out back of beyond, watching the sun sink lower towards the west, chased by the clouds of a graying sky, and spoke relaxedly and comfortably about my hopes, dreams and plans for the future. They were, to a large extent, different then than what I have come to do, and what I hope for my future now, but then they were ripe, and fresh, and truthful as any words ever spoken by a fresh out of school young man. This woman, this friend, offered me her counsels and guidance, in what seemed to be the same open, heartfelt, fashion. I didn’t exactly follow all of her advice (I am not studying at Harvard), but it was none the less good and valuable, and more importantly it meant a great deal to me, and I appreciated it.
Recently the company she started has fallen into disrepair, and her associations with business partners, and customers (many of them friends) have been sundered by poor practices and a lack of communication. Untruths had apparently been told to partners, employees and supplies. Among them was her name.
Hearing this did not, honestly, surprise me. And I began in my mind the process of writing her off as just another one, among many, who couldn’t handle the pressures of a successful business and cut and ran in a dishonest fashion. She wouldn’t have been the first in the business, nor the first I’d known, and certainly not the last.
And then I read something someone else in our business, who called her friend and had worked with her, wrote about his recent communications with her in an effort to straighten things out (including the transfer of her company into more capable hands). And he spoke well of her, with compassion, and consideration. This man is not someone I know well, but he is by all accounts a hard man, and has his own demons – And he spoke about our mutual friend with a heartfelt sympathy for her situation. And he said something that resonated, “Personally, once I call someone a Friend, I keep doing my best for that person”.
And I remembered a late afternoon phonecall, from my home to… somewhere, possibly Texas. From me to… someone, a friend. A person who gave me advice, who reached out from a place where no one would have thought badly of her for not doing so, to a teenager with ideas and hopes, and offered him her encouragement as a then successful professional.
I emailed the man who also calls himself a friend of my old friend, as I no longer have any idea how to get in touch with her, or what to call her if I did, and asked that he pass along my fond memory, and my best wishes, to our friend. Because I haven’t forgotten, and it is still important to me – And in the face of it, what has come about later, what has come about since, doesn’t matter.
So I have to ask, what is in a name? I knew Cameron, but there was none. So what? Who ever, how ever, that person is, they did something important to me, for me, with me, and that is something I will not forget, whoever they are.