DOWN HOME: A ‘Marv’ by any other name …_92203

Posted: 9/19/03

DOWN HOME:
A 'Marv' by any other name …

We've reached a new era in our family. My youngest daughter, Molly, calls me by my first name.

Well, not precisely my name, but an endeared version of my name. And she does it only part of the time.

Say it's almost time for dinner, and Molly's upstairs, and she needs to come down to eat. I stand at the foot of the stairs and call out, “Molly!” She's taken to calling back, “Marvie!”

MARV KNOX Editor

In my lifetime, I've known a zillion people, and Molly's the only one who's ever called me Marvie.

My real name's Marvin, but since I'm named for my dad and lived in the same house with him for almost 19 years, I've never gone by my real name.

At first, I was Little Marv, which baffled me, even as a toddler. Daddy was Marvin, not Big Marv, so why did all these people insist on calling me Little Marv. I felt So Big when they dropped the Little.

Growing up, I had a couple of family names. On Daddy's side, everybody called me Buddy. Don't know where that came from, but it stuck. At weddings and funerals, cousins still call me Buddy. Mother's dad, Popo, called me “Boy!” about half the time. It always seemed to bother Mother for him to do that, but I loved it. Something about the way he said it. “Come with me, Boy!” Or “Wanna go fishing, Boy!?”

By the time I got to junior high, I got called names because Daddy is a pastor. Mr. Barnes, the choir teacher, took to calling me Moses. Theologically speaking, that never made sense to me, but then again I didn't expect much theology out of Mr. Barnes, and at least he didn't call me Judas or Jehoiakim, although I probably would've thought Nebuchadnezzar was cool.

Soon, my friends took over, and they started calling me Rev, short for Reverend. Some preacher's kids might not have liked a nickname like Rev, but I enjoyed it. And it was loads better than some of the lockerroom names we called most of my friends.

In college, my Alpha Phi Omega nickname was Woodstein, after journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. The moniker was too contrived, and it never stuck. My friend Mop started calling me Jack, but that's a long story.

After college, the nicknames sorta dried up. Of course, Joanna, my wife, calls me little names I won't tell you. And some readers have written to call me names I can't tell you.

But I've gotten a kick out of being called Marvie. However, I appreciate being called Daddy even more, since I adore the name because it's also the title of my favorite job.

What do people call you? One of the great things about the Christian faith is the realization that the God of the universe knows your name and speaks it with love.