My A to Z Challenge Theme this year is the ABC's of me. Each day in the month of April with the exception of Sundays I will be posting about one aspect of my life that begins with the letter of the day. Today's letter is D so let's get right to it shall we?
If you memorized my A to Z challenge theme reveal from March, (and really why wouldn't you?) you would have noticed that David Davidovich is not what I wrote for D. My original D was Daring Do Gooder and as I said in the aforememorized theme reveal I did reserve the right to to change some of my selections. So the story of my deed of daring do-gooding will have to wait, while we explore my patronymic path.
In December of 1992 I went to Russia to teach English and to assist the Russian Baptist Churches in youth ministry. I went to a section of Russia called the Russian Far. The city is much closer to cities in China (1 hour by hydrofoil) and South Korea , and Japan (both less than 3 hours by plane) than it is to Moscow. If you took a train it would be a 6 day 3 hour trip. A car trip would be 108 hours (4.5 days) of driving time and an 8 1/2 hour flight. On one of my vacations I took a 72 hour train trip west and was still in the the continent of Asia only about 1/2 way to Moscow.
I have written quite a bit of my two years in Russia. One thing I discovered in Russia is that middle names are different there. Note: For best results read the next lines in your best Mater voice
In America, where I hail from, what we do is we get a first name, and a last name, and in the middle they give us a middle name. I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think they call it a middle name because it's in the middle.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled interior voice
In Russia they don't have middle names that are new different names they have patronymic naming. This means that the second name describes who your father is. If your a boy named Michael and your Dad's names is Michael then your name will be Michael Mikhailovich. Your brother Vadim will be Vadim Mikhailovich and your sister Nadia would be Nadia Mikhailovna.
The dads name ends in ovich for boys and ovna for girls. Here are 2 little known facts I just made up. Maury Povich's son Oliver lived in f Russia for a few years where his name was Ollie Mauryovich Povich. Ollie Mauryovich Povich, coincidentally is also how they translate Olly Olly Oxenfree into Russian.
I mentioned in yesterday's post that I look a lot like my Dad. We also have the same first name. We have different middle names. So I am David Davidovich but my Dad is not. My Dad was the first born in his family and his Dad and Mom, My Grandparents, chose to give him the name of David. I am the first born son in my family and when I was born my Dad chose his name for me. To me that has always been a great honor he bestowed on me. It was like another line of connection we held together. I had 4 brothers and sisters and when there are that many kids in your family, I think you look for ways that you connect to your parents differently than your siblings. Sharing the same first name was a way we connected.
As I grew up I always found it remarkable when my Dad called me by the wrong name. Now I understood it when he called Keith Chris, or Bonnie Kathy. But how could he mix up my name when we shared the same one?
My wife who is a school psychologist and knows a lot about how the brain works told me years ago that calling a child the wrong name is like getting information from a folder inside your brain but retrieving the wrong file from it. This is exactly what this article in Good Housekeeping says.
Now that I am a parent I sometimes get my kids names mixed up as well. I sometimes call Lucy, Emma and vice versa. Since I only have one Son, I sometimes call him by one of my brothers names. Also I sometimes call Lucy, who is the baby of our family my baby sister's name.
I thought for a long time that I would give a son the name David. I have friends whose first and middle name goes back 3-5 generations and they have in turn passed on that name to their son. My Dad and I do not have the same middle name, so I am not the second or jr. In that way I felt less pressure than what I imagined my friends Lawrence Joseph the third and Albert Frederick the 5th felt. I still wanted to pass that name on to my son.
As I have mentioned many times in this space, my wife and I were friends for 7 years before things developed in a Sitting in the Tree kind of way. We both grew up about 20 minutes from each other. So during breaks from college we spent lots of time together in our parents houses. During that time Amy was learning through observation what life is like when there are 2 people living in the house with the same first name.
The phone would ring, someone would answer it. Dave you have a phone call, they would shout down the stairs. Two David's would go for the phone, and then more shouting. Not you, your Dad. No not you Dave, David! So Amy decided that if she ever did get married that her husband would not be recycling names with their son. That was for me, she thought but not her husband. Years later when the part of her husband was cast and I landed the role, one of our desires had to be modified.
It was really no problem. Probably because I wasn't David Fred the 5th, or even David Fred Jr. I was just plain David Charles. I realized that not giving my first name to a theoretical son was in no way, shape or form, a deal breaker. When Amy was pregnant for the first time we had names picked out for a boy and for a girl. Emma Kayrene for a girl and Anderson David for a boy. Kayrene was Amy's mothers name a conglomeration of Kathryn and Irene. Anderson is my wife's maiden name. We would have called him Andy. I thought that there was not much difference in honoring my Dad through middle name or through first name.
Our first child was a girl, so we did call her Emma Kayrene. Two years later we were expecting again. We had a name picked out for both a boy and a girl. Off hand I don't remember what the girls name was we had picked out. The baby inside of Amy didn't feel like an Anderson David, so we had a different boys name ready, Charles. Charles is my middle name so naming a boy Charles David had a good ring to it. However that's not what we went with. Two years before Emma was born my Sister named her third child, Calvin David and 9 months before my son was born, my brother named his son Robert David. I thought that's a lot of blank Davids. So, when our son was born we named him Charles Friedrichs. My middle names nd my grandfather's last name. Also Friedrichs was similar to my Dad's middle name of Fred.
Now, I have no Russian ancestors. However, I still feel I have a bit of a Russian heritage as I lived there for 2 years of my life. I was immersed in the Russian culture and I partnered with many Russian believers in spreading the gospel in their country.
I didn't have much culture shock when I was in Russia and I rarely missed home. But there was one day in particular when I did feel lonely and isolated. It was Easter Sunday in the U.S. but generally Russia celebrates Easter on a different Sunday. My friend Vladimir told me in Church that Sunday there were two Americans in town who were in Russia for a few weeks and that we would visit them after Church. I was looking forward to speaking English with some of my country men and getting news from America and perhaps sending some letters to my family and friends off with them. It was a bit of a misadventure . We travelled on several tram and trolley bus lines to a couple of places and did not find them. We ended u going even further out and going to Vladimir's house. His dad was a kindly man who spoke no English and while my Russian was okay 4 months in, we really couldn't communicate unless Vladimir translated.
We were sharing a meal together with Vladimir's family when his Dad said in Russian, something along the lines that because of Christ I was like another son to him, a member of his family. It was an observation, spoken aboyt me not directly to me but it had more impact than his Dad probably every realized. From that moment I felt Russian. I felt as if I belonged in the country. I felt much that way from the beginning of my time in Russia. But after Vladimir Vladimirovich's father said that I never had one moment of culture shock or loneliness. I belonged.
I think for this reason, not only do I consider myself David Davidovich, I consider my son Charlie Davidovich. and my daughters Emma and Lucy Davidovna. My grandparents choice of the name David was passed on to me and I feel that it's been passed on to my children as well.
So that's it for D post today.
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Coming Up on Team Saturdazzle: The One Without The Koolaid
