A revelation

I found out yesterday (err, Sunday. Since I haven't slept yet, it is still Monday even though the calendar insists it is Tuesday. I digress) that I was named for somebody. I knew that I was almost named for my Granddad, but since he loathed his given names he refused to let my parents put that name on me. But Dad told me yesterday that my middle name is from a cousin of Grandma's who died in the Pacific theatre of World War II.

I am named for someone even though our names are not actually spelled alike. Dearing (pronounced "Daring" by Grandma) Pritchard had volunteered in the army even before Pearl Harbor and died in a POW camp after the fall of the Philippines. There is a page devoted to him in the family history book (he is a son of Harv if you are wanting to look him up).

The astounding part is that I didn't know this (or had completely forgotten). I just assumed that both of my given names were from the baby book or something. No idea that there was a family connection until Dad mentioned it while we were talking about something else, perhaps onhow my middle name was spelled (I don't remember how we got on the subject). Dad said that he had to guess about the spelling on Dearing's name, thus the difference between his and my name.

I now have new respect for my middle name. I had started a rumor more than once that my middle name was something else (something that sounded more believable coming from Arkansas. The trick of a good lie is how close to the truth it can be and still be believable. Not that I wanted to sound more like I was from Arkansas, just that I could not avoid that connection, having Arkansas license plates. Not that I make it a practice to lie. I just didn't want people to know my middle name who would then want to say it all the time, so I purposefully let them guess wrong and say it was correct, then when they proved my suspicion correct that they were going to use it all the time, I would tell them that it was not my true middle name, making them feel even more foolish and giving them no grounds to argue that I should tell them my actual middle name when they had already proved that they could not be trusted to stay quiet about it. One of them insisted on using my phony middle name anyways because she liked calling me by first and middle, and a wrong middle name was better than none at all). But now I have reason to be proud of my middle name, it means more to me now. Thanks Dad for sharing that history. Thanks Dearing for representing our country and family well.

God bless,

Bradley Dearing (don't look too bad, does it?)