Category Archives: autobiographical

[Thursday 3pm #8] The Names

21 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

, , ,

As a child, one of my prized books was a book of baby names and their meanings. Not because I was planning names for my own children, but because I found it fascinating to discover what people’s names ‘really meant’. I thought it gave me insight into their true character. It also gave me a certain type of power, coming to school and announcing to other children what their names meant.

My name is of Hebrew origin and means ‘Gift of God’; I tried to read as much as I could into that. I told James at school he had a very bad name, as his name means ‘Deceiver’. I wondered how anyone could call their child James, knowing this.

And then there was Matthew C., whose name was Greek for ‘Gift of God’. I always wanted to be his best friend, and I thought this linked us in some special way. I told him this theory, but he was not entirely convinced. When he moved to Iceland, he didn’t reply to the letter I sent him.

Perhaps I have disabused myself of some of the primitive notions I had about names as a child, but not entirely. Instinctually, I still feel that other ‘Nathans’ should (a) be friendly to me and (b) have some trait of Nathanness to them. Time has proven neither of these things to be true.

Just as important as the ‘meaning’ of names has been the antecedents for names. I have always loved the tension present in my given names – Nathan David – from the Old Testament figures with those names. Nathan is the brave prophet who rebuked the poet king for adultery and murder. David is my father’s name; that irony interests me too.

‘Nathan’ used to be a fairly rare given name, of which I was very proud. ‘Hobby’ is uncommon too, and it was strange when another family of Hobbys moved to our country town when I was eleven. We didn’t think they were related; years later we discovered they were second cousins, separated from our awareness by family secrets.

One of these Hobbys was called Joshua, and was about the same age as my brother Joshua. I didn’t know what to make of this idea – would it be like having a twin brother to have someone with the same name? Or did it make a person un-unique, did it compromise their specialness, their distinctiveness in the world? I leaned toward the latter interpretation, and thought it a terrible cruelty to be a Smith, or even worse a John Smith.

In the year below me at high school, there were two Laura Smiths. Different years were never known beyond vague rumours, and it took me a long time to work out they were talking about two different Laura Smiths. One of them I knew by sight; the other I didn’t. A year after I graduated, one of them died in a car accident. I wondered if it was the one I knew by sight, or the one I didn’t, and tried not to think of it as sadder if it was the one I knew by sight. I wondered what the surviving Laura felt, if it seemed a close call.

And then, finally, last year I met, in a manner of speaking, the only other Nathan Hobby I know of in the world. I found him on facebook. He’s younger than me and into football, from what I can gather about him. I thought there would have to be something essentially similar about us. But of course, there didn’t have to be. I still get a shock on my facebook feed when I read statements like ‘Nathan Hobby is no longer in a relationship’.

But then perhaps the more remarkable twin, an almost Borgesian one, is my literary twin, Nathaniel Hobbie. When I was working in a public library in 2004, his book arrived about the same time as my book came out. It was called ‘Priscilla and the Pink Planet’ and it’s about a little girl obsessed with pink. His career has been more successful than mine so far; he’s followed up with four other books about Priscilla.

It sounds like a Vonnegutian alter ego for me; I even started a novel called Lazarus the Pacifist Superhero with Nathaniel Hobbie as the main character. It makes it seem there must be some power to names and that out in the world are variations on each person.

Do you have a twin out there in the world?

[Thursday 3pm #6] All the houses you ever lived in

07 Thursday May 2009

Posted by in autobiographical, Series: Thursday 3pm feature posts (2009)

≈ 6 Comments

After attending a party, we found ourselves near the house we lived in when we were first married. Both being so sentimental, we drove past it.

‘Wouldn’t you love,’ she said, ‘to buy all the houses you ever lived in? So you could have them forever.’

And I felt excited she said this, because it was one of those times when someone articulates something in my head that I thought unarticulatable or simply too unformed or silly to say.

Sometimes it’s an unbearable thought, all the houses I ever lived in still existing in their own ways, inhabited by someone else who now has more claim on them than me. But it’s less unbearable than the thought of the houses no longer existing, of their being chewed up by bulldozers and a different buildilng existing in the same space. On a long enough timescale, I suppose this is the fate of all the houses I ever lived in. If I could imagine a future for them or for the Earth one million, one billion years hence. But in human timescale, at least one of them will, in all likelihood, outlast me.

The two families that merged to form me – the Winnings and the Hobbys – are wanderers. My parents each lived in maybe ten houses over their childhood. Perhaps this made them want stability when they had their own children; and thus I lived at Lot 105 Railway Parade in Allanson for thirteen years.

In my dreams, this house is always home. I haven’t lived in it since 1996, but I keep returning to it. It sits at the top of a hill on three acres with a gravel driveway which seemed so very long as a child. The brown donkey shed, the rainwater tank, the trees which I knew so well. But usually it’s the inside of it I dream about. I wonder how I know that it’s this house when I wake up? Perhaps I see the orange kitchen. (A childhood friend, reading my novel The Fur remarked that she noticed the kitchen she remembered so well too.) But it’s more than colours or a physical geography, it’s a spiritual knowledge that it’s the same house.

I once started a writing project where I intended to decribe, exhaustively, each room of that house and the memories associated with them. I started with the laundry, of all places, and its first aid cabinet full of icecream containers of aging treatments, expired ointments.

Since that house, I have lived in fourteen houses, returning to the wandering roots of my family tree. Now I’m exiled from each one; I can only hope to drive past and see what it has become from the outside. And being so pathologically fearful of what people might think, hating to think of them saying, ‘What’s that car doing out there,’ I’m scared to stop.

My wife’s family is good at staying put; I visited the house her mum grew up in a few years ago, still in the family. I could feel all the memories and family history in that house, it was the pantina of so many decades.

I felt sad hearing this year that, just weeks after its sale, the new owners demolished it. Such disregard for the beauty of a house, the years of life poured into each one.

What about you? Do you long to own all the houses you ever lived in? Do you drive past when you find yourself in the area?