The Naming of My Youngest Daughter, Newly Baptized

I was listening to an old audio recording of Terence McKenna that someone had put on YouTube while I was cleaning my parents' kitchen. Actually, I wasn't cleaning the kitchen. I was eating tacos. We had picked up two twelve-packs of various hard-shelled supreme, soft-shelled supreme, hard-shelled, and soft-shelled tacos on our way home from the property where we are planning to build a house. It was a Monday afternoon, after Veralee had gotten off work sometime around 4:30. The Property, as we called it, was a place to go to be reminded of our existence. We had been living with my parents after selling our old house, and while my parents have been more than gracious, the house felt crowded.

So, after getting home from the trip, I was standing in my parents' kitchen (with full intentions of cleaning it), while dousing my gut with Taco Bell and listening to McKenna deconstruct Finnegan's Wake, which (as I remembered on my walk in the woods) was the same thing as deconstructing Joyce. To deconstruct the work is to deconstruct the man.

McKenna was chasing this rabbit about the entire universe being contained within the pages of Finnegan's Wake, which is the same thing as saying that Joyce put as much as possible of himself as he could've in the book. There's no way to put the entire universe inside a book unless you could put an entire man inside it. A universe can't fit inside a book, but it can fit inside a man. And that's what Joyce did, I suspect. He put himself inside that book, then stepped into his grave.

It was naming, I think, that McKenna was after. I suggested to my wife that our daughter Emmalee was the only person in the world who truly bore her name. There's a tradition on her side of the family of naming daughters with names ending in -lee. Veralee, Rosalee, Marylee, and other names similar to our daughter's. Our eldest had taken the first name Elanor, then we added Leigh as a middle name as a sort of insurance policy in case we never had another girl. With that obligation being provided for, we felt safe enough to give our second daughter the name Evelyn, after her father's mother's mother who had recently died. We compensated for such an affront to my wife's sensibility, of providing a daughter from her loins with the name of a grown woman from the other side of the family, by assigning to Evy her mother's middle name, which was also the last name of her mother, Massey. But to our third-born girl, who bears the distinction of being the only one born both after the vasectomy and on purpose, we gave the name Emmalee, which was for all practical purposes the equivalent of naming her Veralee, Jr.

I was walking with Emmalee, in the woods, chatting about life. She's nine. She asked me where words came from. It was a good question. I had been thinking a lot about that question myself. Stooping on the path that wove through the thicket of rosebriar and honeysuckle, I picked up a stick and grunted at it, then picked up a leaf and grunted something else. I asked her if that was how the first words happened. Then, a little later, along came an ape-woman, the ape-man's grand daughter, and she was sniffing around on the ground and picked up a rock and barked a different sound, and all her grandchildren knew what that word was just because she had spoken it for the first time.

We were holding hands, and the sticker bushes were flushed with green. The rain had fallen a half-hour earlier, and golden streams of sunlight poured upon us from the western horizon.

You can do that, too, Emmalee. You can see something new and give it a name. Look out there, and notice something new for the first time, and then give it a brand new name.

She looked at me doubtfully, for a moment. But then she looked up into a tree, smiled, and declared that she had discovered the Tree Y.

And what is a Tree Y?

Here's the definition of Tree Y. A Tree Y is when two branches in a tree make a Y. That is called a Tree Y. 

And here's how it's spelled: Tree Y. With a big T and a big Y.

She added:

A Tree V is when a tree comes up out of the ground like a V.

And then:

A Tree T makes a T!

I thought about how that word was going to cause problems for her when she began to study history. Anyway, what about the other letters? Didn't she notice yet the infinite curves of the woods? What about Ds and Ss? I swear I'd seen a Tree G before. Why not just name the entire alphabet? Or why stop there? Why not invent new letters, 26 more? An alphabet of opposites. Tear down sound itself.

What utterance F? What vibrations philharmonicaleighatkinetics?

Anybody who ever came across a new kind of tree shape that he'd never seen before could use the name that she had invented. I told Emmy that it was okay to name things that she had never seen if she thought they could be out there. I mentioned Higgs boson.

Later, on the drive home, I told her that Hope is the naming of the unseen. Deeper than Faith. It owes more to the soul. I think it's out there, but I need something written down to remind myself. Something not far from me.

My youngest daughter is in my heart. I told her that I am in her heart, too. I told her that to love someone is to put them into your heart, and that they would live forever, as long as you held them there.

Hold me there, Emmy.

Hold us there, reader.

Together, forever.

In the woods, where you see Tree Ys.