Zora's names

Sorry it's been almost three weeks since the last post- lots has been going on, and this long post was a long time in the making.

We had Zora's naming ceremony Sunday before last- it was a really lovely day, and we were so honored to have our closest family members, both blood and adopted, share the occasion with us. More on that day, including photos from the lens of Uncle Genius, coming soon.

Zora's full name is a bit of a mouthful- Zora Tali Newman Greene. As a part of the ceremony on Sunday, we explained where we got the names from and what they mean to us, so I thought I'd put it out there for all to read.

C and I landed on Zora very easily. Last April, when the zygote that was to be our daughter was about two weeks into production (I strongly suspected it, C did not yet know), we visited C's family in Ohio. While there, we had the privilege of being in the audience of a play starring C's cousin Annetta, who many readers may remember from her great rendition of "Unforgettable" at our wedding. One of the other actresses was named Zora, and C leaned over to me and whispered "What do you think of the name Zora?" My response was, "Ooh, I've always liked that name." And presto, our daughter, who we didn't yet know for sure was coming, had a name.

Of course, "Zora" is more than just the name of an actor in a play we saw. The name was on each of our independent radars in the first place because of Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance author, WPA anthropologist, and wearer of great hats. She has always struck me as a great mind, a great individualist, and a strong character who shucked any of the accepted roles and exceeded any of the expectations to which the circumstances of her birth may have limited her. Looking at the existing black and white and sepia images of her, and reading what she and others wrote about her life, I see someone with a cutting intellect and independence of thought who accepted no less in others, who possessed a refined sense of the music of both the English language and the human experience. Also, did I mention the hats? Really sharp hats. This is one woman I could really hope that my daughter might emulate.

(Old family friends Chip and Barbara gave us a photogravure that Chip made from the original negative of this portrait. How awesome of a gift is that?)

About a month and a half before our trip to Ohio, my Grandma Thelma, who had been living a few blocks from my folks since she moved East from Ohio in 1998, turned 95. We celebrated her birthday with a family dinner, after which Grandma, who was never a person for ceremony or speechifying, went around the table and told each of us her individual thoughts for us. She told me how proud she was of me and my "position" (as she called my job, since I receive a salary, have my own desk, and on very rare occasions, am required to look kinda-sorta professional), and she told Cauley how lucky we all are to have him in the family, how much my grandfather would have liked him, and that she wanted to see a "little Cauley" sometime soon.

This wasn't the first time she had put in a specific order to Cauley and me. Some point in 2002, she called each of the grandkids into her apartment, one by one, and went down a little checklist of things she had to tell us - before it was "too late", I guess. On her list were the four grandchildren's names, then four little sub-lists of messages/requirements for each of us. Cauley and I were the third down the list, and there was a faint pencil checkmark next to my cousins Mike and Aaron's names ahead of us, and next to each item in the little list pertaining to each of them. I don't remember most of the three or four items she read to me, except for the last one: "I want to kick up my heels at your wedding," she said, to Cauley and me who, after two years, had discussed the idea of marriage in fairly general terms, but hadn't buckled down to anything specific. "You may be very close (what a nice euphemism, I thought), but let me tell you, there's nothing in the world like being married." How, exactly, is one supposed to respond to that? "We'll think about it, Grandma," I said, more as a protective reflex toward Cauley than anything. She pointed her finger- "You do more than think about it."

Soon after we returned from last year's trip to Ohio, my grandmother fell and broke her ankle. As is often the case with that kind of situation, it was the beginning of a pretty dramatic decline in her physical state. Until the moment of her fall, she had maintained as much autonomy and control of her life as possible, obsessively balancing her checkbook to the penny every week and sticking to a strict regimen of neighborhood walks, although the walks were shorter and shorter and increasingly assisted by her "sportscar," the shiny red walker. The fall left her confined to her wheelchair in a nursing home, and, I think, increasingly depressed. At first, she was supposed to be going through physical therapy, which my grandmother, ever the athlete, would have loved. But her cast kept her from working on her walking, and, by the time the cast came off, she had really grown too weak and had lost her will to walk again. We watched her progressively shrink and fade.

Mentally, Grandma seemed to come and go, and her voice nearly disappeared, but there were definite flashes that she was still in there. She was so excited that Cauley and I were having a baby, and rallied in ways that surprised us all on most of the occasions we visited. Some point in November, I brought a little dress I was knitting for the baby-to-come to show off, hoping this might be something to capture my grandmother's interest. Grandma was not a knitter, but was a great darner, mender, re-user and perfectionist. Her fingers automatically wandered to a spot where my amateur knitting had left a gap at the neckline, and she pointed out "You need a slip-stitch." I don't even know what that is- I've never darned anything in my life. When I told her that my fingers hadn't even gotten fat during my pregnancy, Cauley joked, "Knock on wood," and out of her silence, my funny grandmother came out with, "You need to knock him on the head."

We were so lucky to be able to introduce Zora to Thelma three times- the last time was last Monday, on Grandma's 96th birthday. My mom had been there earlier in the day and eaten some birthday pie, my grandmother's favorite treat. When we got there that afternoon, though, my grandmother was awake-but-not-awake, sitting in her wheelchair but unable to open her eyes or communicate with us. We all knew that this was not a birthday that she wanted to celebrate- she was not living her life in a way she ever intended for it to be lived. She died this past Thursday afternoon.

Zora's middle name, Tali, is after my grandmother Thelma. She was a great athlete, a swimming teacher and surrogate mother to hundreds of lost boys who came through the Boy Scout troop she and my grandfather led together, a seat-of-her-pants gardener who canned a crawlspace full of produce every year of my mother's childhood, an intensely competitive, plain-speaking holder of intimidatingly high expectations for her children and grandchildren. (When C ran his first marathon, she said "I hope you win!" When we explained that thousands of people would be running, from all over the world, many of them professional athletes, and C wasn't going to win, her reply was, "Well, maybe you'll come in third.") She was a loud laughter and sneezer, a penny-pincher, and a taker of no bullshit (although she would have called it something like "horsefeathers" or "hooey." More likely, she would have just given a look meaning as much). She was a real individualist and lacking in prejudice, qualities upon which she and my grandfather built their home and established the foundation for our family.

When I was still pregnant and my grandmother was still in the nursing home, she came out of the world to which her physical condition had limited her and said "I see you with three little ones." "We'll start with one, Grandma," I demurred. But neither of us would be surprised if we did end up filling her order- she never gave us many other options.