First Things First

My name is Louisa Adams Bradbury, but most people I know and all the people I love call me Lucy. According to family lore, my mother dubbed me Lucy the same day she named me Louisa--before we'd even left the Boston hospital in which I was born.

The story goes that even though my mother had named me Louisa after a dear friend of hers who had moved away, she didn't want to leave my nickname to chance or to the tasteless whims of others. She didn't want me to end up being called, Lu or Lulu or Weezie, or any other variation on Louisa that she feared someone might come up with.

For that I am grateful. I've always liked being Lucy more than Louisa. I don't know--Louisa has always felt somehow like a fussy name, a little too Victorian, perhaps.

Besides, why would I want to be called Louisa when the only times that my "real name" was invoked had to do with parental anger  ("Louisa A. Bradbury, don't you talk to me like that!") or with strangers who didn't really know me?

Except for those times when my father chose to introduce me to some grown up as "my daughter Louisa." Actually, it was sometimes more unfair than that. He would say: "These are my daughters, Molly and Louisa." My sister got introduced by her nickname, and I did not. What was up with that?

To be sure there were times when I received unsolicited advice that it would be appropriate, given my advancing age, to forsake Lucy and become known only as Louisa. Our family dentist was one of the first people to suggest this to me when I was still in high school and he still exhaled stale cigarette breath on his patients when he leaned over us to check our teeth.

Later, in graduate school, I attempted to grow up and "become Louisa." I gave up after several weeks. I couldn't stand the feeling that even the people I lived and worked with didn't really know me. I felt like a fake, as if I was withholding some precious information from these people and as a result, I was closing off the possibility of genuine relationships. What's in a name? It turns out--a whole lot.

So Lucy is who I am. And Lucy is who I choose to be, even now at the age of fifty-six.

PS. I am grateful to Sukie Curtis for the image behind my blog's title. It's a detail from her painting, "Sunflowers Late Summer." Other images can be found at her website, www.sukiecurtis.com .