Daily Blague

If you are a correspondent or a friend of mine ("same difference"), you have become accustomed to the fact that I think of myself in initials. Always in the small case: rjk. It looks so nederlander, really; just add a letter and you have rijk - "country." Well, I never denied that I'm grandiose.

"RJK" looks noisy to me. I'm a writer, not a president.

My name, which I rarely spell out, is Robert John Keefe. (Just to be completely informative: I am male.) Trust me when I say that "Keefe" is a very difficult name to communicate via telephone. I was brought up to rattle off "K double-E F-as-in-'Frank' e," but, really, it's easier to say "Keefe as in 'O'Keefe'." That's what the name was, after all ("O'Keeffe," actually), and everybody gets it.

As for 'Robert John'!

If I am not a famous person today, it is because entirely too much of my youth was spent squashing the attempt to call me "Bob." There are, presumably, good people named "Bob," but I utterly and completely do not wish to be one of them. Problematically, I am also not a "Robert." There have been crazed moments when adopting the original, Teutonic version of this name - Rodibert - seemed attractive, but you'll agree that I was wise to resist.

"RobertJohn," though, has a certain alliterative charm. I discovered it as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, where, thanks to a widespread lack of imagination, there were lots of Roberts and Michaels. Now that I think of it, though, "Robert John" and "Michael Patrick" were the only brands - first names that needed no surname for identification. We were both tall, formidable, sports-hating men. I discovered all the attractions of Unhappiness at Notre Dame, but I also left with a double name - a double name that, in the Houston years that followed, quickly became double initials.

I ask you to remember 1979. Dallas. Nobody ever, ever asked, "Who shot RJ?"

The "JR" thing went on for about as long as recollection of my having lived in Texas went on. They were forgotten, eventually, together. I was simply "Arjay" to everybody. To everybody except a secretary at EF Hutton, where my career as a working person came to an end (shortly before EF Hutton's). According to the secretary, I was, delightedly, "Archie." She could have no idea how blessed I felt to share the real name of Cary Grant.

Now, a story from les temps bygones. We were on our way to Mass. It might have been 1960, but it was probably earlier. I announced that I was going to change my name when I grew up. Remember, I was an adopted child who felt a certain rootlessness. Doubtless I was "testing." If I didn't say what I was going to change my name to, that's only because my mother immediately turned toward the back seat and hissed that if I ever did such a thing I'd be completely disowned, and, believe me, she could make "disowning" sound like "disemboweling."

Is that why I haven't changed my name? No. Having lived with my name for nearly sixty years, I've gotten used to it. It's not the name I was born with - I may never know that - but it's who I've been for a very long time. The simple truth is that all the alternatives sound like other people - people I'll never be. I'm just rjk. Even though nobody ever says "arjaykay." To me, I'm not so much the sound as the look of those three lower-case letters. That's me - c'est moi.

When my first wife was pregnant, we in our ultrasound-deprived thinking picked two names. Miss G eventually got the one earmarked for a girl. Quentin Alexander Lindley Keefe never came into being, but the name is taken, don't you agree?