MyPod

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My daughter came home from grad school with the ultimate Father’s Day gift for her dad—an iPod Nano. To be more specific, a light metallic blue iPod Nano. As she began to show him how to download the music from his (evidently out-of-date) mp3 player, she looked at him and said, “Okay, Dad, what do you want to name it?”

“Name what?”

“Your iPod.”

“Oh—I didn’t know it needed a name.”

“How ‘bout ‘Baby Blues’?” I jumped in from my nearby perch on the couch.

“That works,” my daughter began to enter the name into the tiny sliver of metal.

“Why ‘Baby Blues’?” my husband asked.

“Because your gadget-thingy is the color of your eyes and it’s tiny like a baby and it plays music and we live in Memphis, home of the blues.”

It took a minute for it to sink in, and then my husband asked, “So, what would you name your iPod Nano if you had one?”

I was quick with my answer, “Peapod.”

“Peapod?” Father and daughter asked in unison.

“Yes. I want one in pea green. You know, the color of new life that germinates from the seeds inside the pod and grows into a verdant garden of music.”

My husband looked at our daughter and said, “Your mother has been writing poetry again.”

He was right. And you know, one purpose of poetry is the naming of things.

Throughout history poets have understood the necessity of giving names to things and events so we won’t forget their significance—their meaning. It started in the Garden, when God named Adam and Eve. Then he told Adam to name the animals.

How cool would that be? Imagine, for example, looking at a brown furry football-shaped animal covered in long sharp needles that could shoot out of its body and saying, “Hmm—porcupine.”

Parents take great care (or they should) in naming their children, sometimes passing on a family name with all its baggage and expectations. Others seek to imbue their offspring with help from on high, naming them after saints
or angels or even the Holy Mother Mary herself. In the Eastern Orthodox Christian
tradition, godparents sometimes do the naming, on the eighth day after the child’s birth. There is even a ceremony for it. Name Days (feast days of patron saints) are often celebrated with more pomp than birthdays.