I was born on August 28, 1969—ten days after Woodstock. This is pertinent information if you have the need to know anything about me. The era I was born in, as well as the spelling of my name, has created me as much as living with addicts has. Because of my name, I will teach. My name has made me witty. And my name has given me attitude.
Mom was eighteen when I was born. Dad was a drummer in a band, married to someone else, with another family, other children; he had no time for a teenage fan he happened to knock up. So it was Mom and me. Being only eighteen in the latter part of the 60s, Mom felt it necessary to tweak her baby’s name. I was christened Syndee Marie King by a mother who may or may not have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug throughout her pregnancy. I took up residence in an era when young parents rebelled with the names of their children as much as they did with closed fists and burned bras.
As I grew up and noticed the other names of children, I felt grateful that my name was only spelled wrong—other names were just plain wrong. A girl in my ninth grade Algebra class was named Sundae, as in ice cream with whipped cream, nuts, and a cherry on top. Mystikle Rayne was in my graduating class too. The newly-launched pop culture craze, Mtv, featured v-jay Dweezil Zappa. Videos by his sister, Moon Unit ranked high in popularity. Of course, rock stars took the child-naming craze to new levels. The one that disturbed me to the core was Grace Slick and her son named god. As if the small g made it okay. Poor kid grew up and changed his name to John, as the legend goes.
I was lucky. My name was only spelled wrong.
When Mom married Scott, he changed my last name to Cadwallader. Well, not legally, of course; he had no intention of adopting me, a child born with an IQ higher than his ever would be. Scott simply told Mom to start using his name on forms since he was my dad now, and Mom did as she was told. But that is another story for another page. And so I entered the public school system armed with my wit, my intelligence and my names.
I was always surprised when teachers couldn’t pronounce my name. Seven-year-old Syndee Cadwallader was perplexed that college graduates with twenty years of teaching kids how to read couldn’t seem to string together the four syllables that made up my last name.
“Cad wall a der,” I would say to myself. “It’s not that difficult!”
And if the last name was tough, the first name was impossible. These professionals who intended to teach me that “y” is often used as a vowel in the English language could not figure out how to place the vowel between two consonants in a proper manner. Syndee became Sydnee, Synder, Sign-dee, and my favorite, Snydee. Parents named their children crazy things in the 60s, this was true, but Snydee?
As a result of this confusion over my names, I grew up with a belief and attitude that I was smarter than the teachers, and that I could do their job better. By fourth grade, I knew I was going to teach someday, and I knew what to expect on the first day of school. When the teacher got to the Cs, I’d give him or her a chance to get it right, marvel at the level idiocy possessed when he or she couldn’t get it right, and I’d eventually butt in with a haughty but correct pronunciation.
“That’s SIN-dee Cad-WALL-a-der.”
It wasn’t until college that any teacher ever got it right. Apparently, the echo of seven-year-old Syndee observed, they don’t teach proper use and pronunciation of the English language until graduate school.
In addition to the desire to teach--so that at least somebody would be teaching the next generation how to speak our language--I grew up with a need to respond quickly to inquiries about my name, or face a lifetime of giving the same boring answers to the same ridiculous questions. Since I’ve worked retail for most of my life, wearing a name tag has helped inspire both the queries and the quips.
Some of my favorites are:
Customer says, “Is your name Cindy? Wow, that a weird way to spell it.” I say, with a shit-eating grin and a sarcastic tone, “Well, thank you!”
Customer says, “What nationality were your parents? “ I say, “American hippie.”
Customer says, “Well that sure is an interesting way to spell Cindy.” I say, “Well I’m an interesting kind of Syndee.” This response wins as this customer was so astonished he later came back and asked me out.
I have often wondered if the fact that my name houses the word “syn,” albeit misspelled, has influenced my take on God and religion, or if that is an innate characteristic of me. Perhaps by the end of this life, I will have the answer to that lingering question. Either way, my name has been an influence on my personality and my existence. Just another subject to discuss on the couch in the shrink’s office.
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ReplyDeleteThis is the elephant in the room for me. The story about my first wife’s illness and passing.
ReplyDelete“It’s bad”. I remember crying into my cell phone, speaking with my wife’s mother. In a panic’d state, I was calling everyone in my wife’s family – and beyond, to let them know that my wife Mary Jo was in critical condition, being kept alive by a breathing machine. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but I did not want to believe that the end of the road to my wife’s valiant battle with cancer was coming to a harsh and extremely unpleasant ending. Compartmentalizing short discreet segments of time was the way I had been getting through the difficult times. Thinking ahead only got me into trouble. But there was no way to deny the inevitable now.
I had taken my wife to the hospital earlier that day for a procedure; one of many dozens over the previous 3 ½ years. I was with her most of the day. A local radio station, WXPN, has a program called
musicians on call” where local players – usually singers with a guitar, go to the hospital beds of critical cancer patients and perform for free. Jim Boggia, one such musician came into our room not long after we had checked in and sang a beautiful rendition of “Blackbird”.
But then I had to go home to take care of my two boys, 15 and 12, the younger one being mildly autistic. (When I say mildly – think Forrest Gump but just somewhat less functional.) The call came in as I was prepping dinner. The doctor called and said I needed to come back in right away. They were going to put MaryJo on a ventilator and I should speak with her before they put her under.
When I got into the ER, she was in bad shape. She looked far worse than she had earlier that day. I realized that this was really bad. I told her I loved her, and she said “You’re the best”. Those were the last words she ever spoke, to me or anyone. They put her under with drugs and put the ventilator into her mouth and turned on the machine. She was now at the mercy of technology.
What had led up to this very sad situation? Roughly three and half years earlier, we were vacationing at her parent’s summer cottage in Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. Eagles Mere is a lovely place. Nestled in the muted, tree-lined Endless Mountains and rolling hills of upstate central-ish Pennsylvania. The town itself was on the top of a mountain approximately 2100 above sea level, and also at the top was a small natural spring-fed lake – the Eagles Mere, created by glaciers millions of years ago.
It is a quite, peaceful and charming little town, basically in the middle of nowhere. That part of Pennsylvania sits in an area known as the dark zone of the northeastern U.S., the best area to see the night sky with virtually no light pollution. Far enough away from major metropolitan centers, the sky is very dark at night and you can easily see the Milky Way in all of its shinning splendor. On particularly clear nights, you could see the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye if you knew where to look. I was taught where to look for it by my sister-in-law’s husband, an avid amateur astronomer, whose family also owned a rather large, neat old house up there. I had spent a lot of summer weekends and extended vacations in Eagles Mere since I had met MaryJo in 1984. She had been going up there her entire life. I thought we would be spending the rest of our lives up there together.
The Labor Day weekend of 2001, we were of course in Eagles Mere. Weather was nice, and I played volleyball with friends I had met up there over the years. In fact, I ended up rupturing one of the tendons on my right hand index finger that very weekend, and I was going to get it checked out when we got back home.
ReplyDeleteMary Jo suddenly became very ill, seemingly out of the blue. I took her to the local medical center,which is not equipped to handle serious matters. They immediately sent her by ambulance to the hospital in Williamsport, approximately 30 miles west. Williamsport is the home of the little league world series and is tucked in between the mountains. It is a fairly small city compared to any major U.S. metropolis, but it does have a decent hospital and other amenities. I followed the ambulance in my car. The road to Williamsport from Eagles Mere is a winding two lane road that whips around the various mountains and farms in the area. Normally a pleasant drive, this time it was unfriendly; the turns taking up too much time, the shadows from the mountains – menacing.
The doctor came out to speak with us after reviewing her chest xray. “It looks like lymphoma. You will need to get a biopsy right away back home.”
Wow. From that point on, our lives changed dramatically. Now, everything was a rush. No medical office visit, procedure or follow up could happen fast enough. And they never seemed to happen fast enough. Honestly, I couldn’t even believe it. I was in denial. “That can’t be right”. We would get the biopsy and they would change their minds, I figured. But the ominous prospect that she did have cancer was frightening and we couldn’t shake free of it.
The day of the biopsy was Sept 10. I had taken the day off from work and was awaiting the preliminary results. There was a nun in the same room who had undergone a treatment for something a day or two ago. I was speaking with her while MaryJo was getting the biopsy. Then the doctor came in, and spoke firmly and objectively. “Your wife has non-hodgkins lymphoma. It’s spreading through her lymphatic system. We will send the culture to a lab to get the specific cell type. But she’ll need to start chemotherapy right away”.
I crashed like I had never crashed before. I was devastated. How could this be? My poor Mary Jo. The prospect that she could die was very real now and hitting me - like the ton of bricks that was to fall on thousands of New Yorkers the next day.