Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons, and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that wasn't a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one, and calls out "Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!" she doesn't get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!
This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves'
As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn.
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O'Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate...
But she didn't do it. And now it's too late.
I reread an earlier post of mine entitled, “On the Sunny Slopes of Long Ago” and was pleased with it. Writing from my heart seems easier than writing with the goal of persuading someone to my views. So I am going to write some “Dad Lore.” I first heard this term from my teenage son, Jackson. One Saturday we were driving home from skiing and I told him the story of when we moved to New England. He was a year old at the time. I drove our car the 2400 miles with my brother in law as companion and he flew with Becky and James a few days later. Our belongings arrived a the same time. The story of the road trip was short and silly, but he enjoyed the “Dad Lore.”
I’ll save that story for later, but this post is about Gary. Gary is the common man, the everyday hero or not even a hero. Gary is just a guy, but also a myth and a legend. There’s nothing special about Gary and that is just the way Gary likes it.
I grew up in the most suburb neighborhood you can imagine. Ten miles north of Salt Lake City the town was 80% Latter-Day Saint. That doesn’t really mean much different than other suburbs except our teenage parties did not have booze. It did mean that I knew nearly every household in the neighborhood. There was a family around the corner that had every child in it except one with significant cognitive and speech deficits. We never bullied them, but it was impossible for them to hang out with the neighborhood boys normally. However, because the days of my youth were spent outside it was inevitable that one or two of the would tag along on our activities.
The oldest of the clan started calling a friend of mine Gary. He did so repeatedly saying the phrase, “Gaaaarry. Nobody Baaarry.” over and over again in his speech impediment drawl. Needless to say the name stuck. My friend was known as Gary from then on. What is strange(yes this was normal life for me) about this is that the name Gary evolved into what we started to call each other. We still do. My brothers and I will call each other Gary and in some strange way we always know who is being questioned, even when there are multiple Garies in the room. Like Dr Suess’s Mrs. McCave it seems my mother has Too Many Garies.
Strangely enough Gary seems to have made waves elsewhere. There is an Instagram entitled Gary Things and is “All Things Gary”. Celebrating the name Gary and how it’s regularly dragged through the mud. The Instagram account is rather funny. Check it out @gary_things.
To be sure we could use a few more Garies in the world. I doubt new babies are named Gary anymore, but if you ever should meet one, shake his hand for me. When it comes to Dad Lore, I would say is tell your kids about your life as you never know what they will like about it, even or especially if it is corny or silly.
This was a very informative post for a non-English speaker. I didn't even know that Gary is an unfashionable name. But at least I knew that Jake is a modern name, because as a teenager I listened to a song by Savage Garden with the following lyrics:
In Santa Monica
All the people got
Modern names like
Jake or Mandy
And modern bodies too