Namesake

My father and I have never been close. He's never been the first person I thought I should call if something goes very well in my life. In fact, I usually have to talk myself into contacting him, whatever the reason.

Recently, I was walking into our vending area at work and noticed the person filling up the machines. He looked somewhat familiar, but I paid him no mind and went to my desk. Later that day, my mother called and asked if I had seen the man in the vending area. It turned out that he's the person that my father named me after. My mom ran into him that same morning and talked to him for a bit about what each of them had been up to for the twenty years since she had seen him last.

I asked her about how long the conversation went on for, and she said they spoke for about five minutes. I found that pretty comical, and I knew at that point that our names were about the only things that we really shared in common. I can go on and on about what actually has or might have happened to me (depending on blood/alcohol content), for what seems to be hours from time to time. He managed to wrap it all up in a 5 minute span.

For those of you that know me well enough, it would be no real shock to find out that after that conversation with my mother, I became angry at my father . To me, picking out the name of my child is a pretty big deal. I'm probably over reacting a bit, but when you pick out the name of your only son, you should probably go with a name of someone that you might be talking to in a few years.

Sarah and I have have spent a good bit of time in the past few years going over the names that we would pick from if we were lucky enough to have a child. So, when we began our fertility treatments, we had to come up with at least two sets of boys and girls names as the odds of us having multiple kids was pretty high. Each name has a pretty special meaning for us, and we'll be happy to give any of the names that we've come up with to our kids.

Sometimes I just wish I could have gotten into my father's head, back then, to understand some of the decisions that he made. I guess the name he chose for me is not one of the items at the top of that list, but it is up there.

I have plenty of questions that I'd like to ask a quite a few different people, and I guess today this is the one that is floating at the surface. I guess I'll always be a "why" person. Why him and not another friend? Looking back though, I'm glad they chose Glen instead of Roy (who was another of my father's friends at the time.) At least this way, I don't have to hear people asking me where Siegfried is.