Thanks to Mum and Rawhide, I’m Anson by any other name

She could never tell me why she named me Anson. It means son of Anne, and her name isn’t that. My four siblings were all given run-of-the-mill names chosen during the ads on Rawhide. Rowdy Yates is facing off against three desperados in a saloon when an ad for Omo laundry detergent breaks into the action. Mum takes this opportunity to ask Dad, ″⁣What about Debbie? Debbie’s nice.″⁣ ″⁣Debbie’s good. Debbie it is,″⁣ he replies, not wanting the naming of kids to run on and interfere with the gunplay.

Everyone named their kids this way back then. Everyone I knew had an ad-break name. But in a world of Johns, Stevens, Bruces and Brads – I was Anson. It was a big statement of some kind. Christ, it was a cry for help. I see it now. Their marriage must have been in deep trouble. Anson wasn’t dreamt up during an Omo ad. It was a panicky declaration that between them they’d done something beyond the norm. Or the Norm. They were wrong about that, in the way all parents are.

Every new teacher looked at me like I was bigging myself up. Each was a Michael, a Ross, a Julie or a Robyn, and Anson seemed to them an outrageous claim for such a clueless boy, a grab at a dukedom, a self-proclaimed exoticness. You’re no Anson, son. You’re just a Dave in furs.

I fought a lot as a boy and I wonder now if it was my name or my nature, or if one shaped the other. A Boy Named Sue kind of thing. “Some gal would giggle and I’d turn red, and some guy’d laugh and I’d bust his head.” At the start of every school year as we introduced ourselves to the new class my anxiety grew as my turn got closer. I knew what was coming. Not even a Pee… Pee… Peter with a stutter was as hilarious as an Anson. Looking back, I think my name was good for me, like frost or hunger can be. But I never liked it until I was about 30.

How would you give someone a name that made them stand out from the crowd in this age of Shyrells, Charmayannes, Kaydens, Taishmaras and Draxlers? We invent a thousand new names a year, searching for originality and finding Phelony. I suppose a Bert would stand out now. He’d trigger hilarity at pre-school. A Peggy would be a freak of nomenclature alongside the many Bershawns. And a Clarrie, well … a Clarrie would have to get tough or die.

When I go to visit Mum now there is an old fellow in the dayroom who jumps creakily to his feet and salutes me and shouts something like, “Hurrah″⁣. I return his salute because not to might spring him from a world that makes sense, and I don’t want to do that. Sometimes I tell him, “At ease,” and he sits and resumes watching the flatscreen, but I don’t believe it’s anything but a kaleidoscope to him.

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When I went to see her the other day she couldn’t remember my name. Which only goes to show there’s a new world between this one and the next. An empire birthed by modern medicine’s snowballing ability to keep people alive. This new world is populated by people who aren’t who they were … until, sometimes, momentarily, disconcertingly, they are. Before they’re not again. Very old folk, flickering in and out, on and off.

I find aged care a confusing world to visit. I come away not knowing whether her facility is a sad place or a brave frontier fort raised to fight an enemy. I come away wondering whether we owe God our true selves or the vestiges he’s able to pick, like a rag and bone man, from this place. Which is to say, I come away wondering if we live too long. In this new world of old folk, in these frontier forts guarding life from death, there are a lot of people who’ve forgotten all the names they ever knew.

It might be a kind of sacrilege, but I wonder about the prolonging of life. Why pander to the flesh once the mind is gone? I guess we’ll soon be able to keep some part of our consciousness alive indefinitely, hanging in a sac on a wall being fed sitcoms via Bluetooth. And then we won’t need to know death at all. Which (tell me I’m wrong.) will cheapen life.

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