My name is Neil Richard Grayson. According to the internet, Neil means champion, Richard means leader, and Grayson means son of a grey-haired man. While I do, to some degree, consider all of these things to be true, I do not put much stock in them. I do not like the idea of having my personality or fate decided by anyone but me.

I was named Neil after my mother’s father. I never met the man, but apparently he was a farmer, a loyal and steadfast man, a provider, and everything else that can be said of the dead. He met a woman, married her the next day and loved her for fifty years. He arrived home every night exhausted and patient, and my mother says I look like him. I never thought he was particularly handsome.

I was named Richard after my father’s father. He sails and he works with his hands. He is a teacher, a principal, and a professor. He builds boxes that can never be opened for people to put loved ones in. He once married a woman when he was nineteen and began to fall out of love. On the day of their twenty-fifth anniversary, the gift my mother made for him slipped from his hands and shattered on the kitchen floor. The next day he walked out on his wife. There are few people I love more than him and the woman he married the second time around. I want to name my son Richard, and I don't know what that says about me.

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