Why Do I Have 3 Last Names?
You’re blind all the time you’re learning to see
Thomas Ginsberg Whitman knew why his parents had named him with three last names. They’d been freshman together at university, thrown together at a poetry reading by fate and a creative writing class. His mom had fallen for Paul Whitman first because she loved Leaves of Grass — the collection by poet Walt Whitman. She’d thought it was a sign from the Cosmos.
Thomas believed it was because she wasn’t so much spiritual, or open-minded, as she was perhaps easily suggestible. But it was the first time his dad’s last name had gotten him laid, so…
Thomas ascended through his school years without meeting any pretty poetry lovers, so by young adulthood he felt quite gypped. He supposed he should be grateful his parents hadn’t been 60s music fans or he could have ended up ‘Hendrix Garcia Whitman’ or ‘Santana Joplin Whitman.’ It was the last name that determined his fate. That and his hippy mother’s love of aromatherapy and beat poet Alan Ginsberg. That both his parents claimed to love the nearly unintelligible British poet Dylan Thomas was how he’d gotten his first name.
He sometimes doubted whether his dad had ever read “O Captain! My captain!” before his mom had first kissed him as a batik-dyed, cotton skirt wearing freshman. He never knew his dad…
