When I was born, parents didn’t know whether they were getting a boy or a girl until birth, so they often had two names ready. If I had been a girl, I would have been Susan. Instead, I was David Michael.
When I was young, people would often comment that my sisters and I all had “Bible names,” so they assumed we were named after Bible characters. But my mother let me know that I wasn’t named for Israel’s King David, even though I adored his exploits because of our shared names.
No, I was named for an inventive little boy who appeared in a series of elementary school reading books. My mother taught young children from these books. And I still have a copy of one of the books from which she taught. The one I have is called “More Friends Old and New,” which had been in print in some form or other since 1912.
I was leafing through this battered old copy tonight — reading the story called “Wheels for David” — and realized that my mother made a good choice. She gave me something to live up to.
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
Economic Man needs no heart, because love and God are dead
My bad teen poetry suggests I’ve always hungered for missing love
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
Society needs storytellers to help make sense of a changing world
Briefly: Join me tonight in watching ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’
Briefly: Artifacts from childhood can remind us where we came from
Briefly: Political action won’t change the world; culture always comes first