Passing along the love of a special name
Isat on the floor in the open doorway of my teenage son’s bedroom closet, handing him items one by one to sort into three piles: keep, throw out and give away.
He’s 14 and no longer has need for soccer cleats, math flashcards or a fuzzy green marionnette with googly eyes. Oh, but Blokus! I love that game. Sawyer humored me and put it on the keep pile.
Folded up on a shelf with a pair of orange Converses two sizes too small and a remotecontrol monster truck with a dead battery was a drawstring bag.
“You can get rid of that,” Sawyer said. But instead of throwing it onto the pile that was going to Goodwill, I smoothed the bag out across my knees. The cotton material is printed with teddy bears holding white daisy bouquets, and “Sawyer” is spelled out on one side in navy-blue iron-on letters.
My friend Kathleen sewed it and gave it to me at my baby shower. Inside were baby Tshirts, tiny socks and a small board book, “Sheep in a Jeep” by Nancy Shaw. Kathleen had grown up with the author.
Even now, I can recite it from memory: I read it aloud many times. More important than what was inside the bag, though, was the name on the outside. I recall tracing the letters with my fingertips.
I could feel the baby moving around inside me, and I had seen him on an ultrasound — but this was the first time I had ever seen his name on anything. Suddenly he seemed more real.
When Jim and I were choosing a name, we turned not to Bruce Lansky’s “The Best Baby Name Book in the Whole Wide World,”
but to the dictionary.
Sawyer has three half-siblings — Sonnet, Sky and Savannah. Each name is an actual word, not a name like Sam or Sarah. We wanted to do the same for this baby.
The list is still there in my Random House College Dictionary with the red cover — 22 possibilities neatly printed in purple pencil on the back of a sheet of paper shaped like a cluster of grapes:
We had narrowed it down to a handful — Storm, Sawyer, Story, Scout, Scarlet — when I saw him on an ultrasound for the first time. A And he was instantly Sawyer, one fist raised above his head, all boyhood and adventure. It just fit.
“Don’t name him that,” my brother Danny later cautioned me, warning, “he’ll get beat up.”
Granted, Sawyer wasn’t high on the Social Security Administration‘s annual list of popular baby names in 1999. It was ranked 480th. Which made me like it even more.
No. 1 that year was Jacob, and Sawyer would become friends with three of them by kindergarten, distinguishing one from the other with the first letter of their last names: Jacob D., Jacob N., Jacob R. (Even Jacob D’s mother calls him “Jacob D.”)
A “sawyer” is someone who saws wood, usually for a living. A builder, I told Sawyer. And he that, first with blocks and Legos and then scrap wood, PVC pipe and duct tape.
There’s no nickname for Sawyer; his sister Savannah tried calling him “Soy Sauce,” but it didn’t stick. My Uncle Virgil found a Sawyer Bland in our family tree in England in the 1800s. I thought the name strong.
Unusual baby names have grown in popularity over the years to the point that this month in my mother’s native New Zealand, the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages released an updated list of rejected baby names, including six attempts — thwarted — by parents who tried to legally name their child “Lucifer.” Other banned names include “Anal” and “4real.” For
(Like I asked my brother when he warned me about the name Sawyer, “Who’s going to beat him up?” Parker? Kyren? Hunter? Ryder? Kadin? It’s the Michaels, Roberts and Johns who are going to get their butts kicked.)
Sawyer is considered trendy now. It was ranked 147th in the government’s new list of the most popular baby names in 2012, up from 172nd in 2011. It is expected by baby-name watchers to break into the top 100 this year or next.
Over the years, we’ve heard about a few other Sawyers — a kid at a friend’s school, someone’s new nephew in California.
But we recently met a baby Sawyer in person, the 6-month-old son of one of my son’s teachers. He smiled at me — all big eyes and pale hair, just like my own Sawyer used to have — and then buried his face in his mother’s shoulder.
Sawyer and I pretend that his teacher was so taken with him that she and her partner named their baby after him. (We told them not to disillusion us by telling us the real reason they chose it.)
Like baby Sawyer’s parents, when I filled out my Sawyer’s birth certificate, I didn’t give much thought to the fact that his unusual name would mean it would not be easy to find it imprinted on pencils, key rings or those little metal personalized license plates for the back of his bike.
After all, my name is unusual, too. (I have cousins named Serena and Terena.)
All of that made the bag with Sawyer’s name on it more precious.
When he was a baby, I used it to carry extra outfits. Then it held soft blocks, and then wooden ones with the alphabet carved into them.
He was about 4 when he took possession of the bag, stuffing it with marbles, plastic dinosaurs and rocks, and weaving the drawstring through his belt loops.
As he got older, he used it to haul stuff up to his tree fort. He put his “Star Wars” action figures in there to “keep them safe.” Later it got used as an ammo bag, filled with glow-in-thedark Nerf bullets.
If Sawyer left the bag at a friend’s house or at school, it always got returned. Whatever was in that bag, it belonged to him. His was on it.
So instead of putting the drawstring bag in the Goodwill pile, or even tucking it away in a memory box, Sawyer and I decided to pass it along to Baby Sawyer.
I washed it. It’s still in good shape. Just the corner of the iron-on “R” is missing. Inside, I tucked a new copy of “Sheep in a Jeep,” a stuffed sheep, a soft Chewbacca and a toy light saber.
Sawyer took it to school to give to Baby Sawyer’s mom. And no matter whether the name breaks into the top 100 or not, Baby Sawyer will know his name is special. It will be right there on his bag.