Naming names

Good morning!

Today I'll write about how Yazzybel came into being.

I was christened Linda Temple Longoria, after my mother. Her baptized name was Linda Proctor Temple, and I am kinda surprised she didn't give me the Proctor too with all the rest.  They were hoping for a boy, and he would have been a Junior.
So when I turned out to be me, they seem to have gone into automatic mode when they named me.

I really never liked having my mother's name. I did not like being, "Little Linda," which I was around the house. But it never occurred to me to protest or to tell anyone how I felt, because to be honest, nobody ever asked me about such things. And truth to tell, I love the name, Linda.  Beautiful in English, and, literally, "beautiful" in Spanish, it fits the bill for a wonderful girl's name.

In my middle age, it began to be a bit confusing, when my mother started signing her papers and checks, "Linda Temple Longoria," instead of Mrs. Benito Longoria--her version of women's lib, I guess.  And I, divorced, had taken back my maiden name because of the Bilingual Program, of which again, more later. So I too was, "Linda Temple Longoria," and I didn't like it. 

"WHY did you not choose a name different from yours, when you named me?" I asked once when I was visiting.  After all, all my sisters had managed to be named after someone else.  My mother was baffled at this rebellion after all those years.
"What could we have named you?" she asked, at a loss.

"Well, there's my Mexican grandmother, Ysabel," I said. "That's a beautiful name too."   My mother sniffed. But she took umbrage, and for some time she took to addressing her letters to me to "Ysabel." She was living in North Carolina at that time, and my then-brother-in-law, a Southerner, once spotted an envelope and asked, "Who is this Yazzabel?" A natural pronunciation for an American reader. But we thought it was funny, and it became my nickname. One of my sisters with her little Lady-Bird-Johnson accent slid the name into "Yazzybel," and there it stuck. I am Yazzybel. I kind of like it; it's funny.

"Yazzy" is a name seen often amongst the Navajo (no connection). And there are Mexican variants such as Yetzabel and Guetzabel, whom I assume to be variations of Jezebel. (Let's go quickly past that one.) But you have read above of the birth of Yazzybel, who, having discovered the electric coffee maker in the garage, has put two and two together and doesn't have to wait for McDonald's coffee any longer.

There, you have had word and memory all in one again. No cooking but the coffee, for which Thank the Lord. And tomorrow, if you are good, I'll tell you how my husband Theodore became the Taterton. YAZZYBEL