I was waiting at a red light downtown in a blissful haze, enjoying—finally—the warmth of the sun and the feel of the shift from a rather gloomy spring to the coming of my favorite season, summer. My eyes focused on the license tag on the car ahead of me and I read “Virginia is for Lovers.” I immediately thought of the irony of names—an irony that I’ve never thought to be coincidental but rather a very clever trick played on us by an all-knowing, loving something or other who patiently watches on as we bumble along trying to figure things out, sometimes killing each other in the process, all in the name of Free Will. For example, look at how the word “evolve” has the word “love” in it. And how the word “heart” has the words “hear” and “art” in it, and how if you add an “h”, you have the word“hearth”—the warm heart of the home, and how “live” spelled backward becomes “evil” and how “god” spelled backward becomes…uh, well okay, so it doesn’t work with every word.

But back to the little joke made unwittingly (although actually, might it be clever spin?) by the State of Virginia with its slogan. The fact is that Virginia was not always for lovers; or it was only for some lovers but not all. Back in the mid-1960’s, Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were sentenced to a year in prison by the State of Virginia for marrying, which violated the State’s anti-miscegenation statute outlawing marriage between people classified as “white” and those classified as “colored.” The Lovings sued the State of Virginia in “Loving v. Virginia,” which was heard in the Supreme Court in April of 1967 and decided on in June of the same year, when it was ruled that Virginia’s race-based legal restrictions on marriage were unconstitutional, effectively ending such laws in the United States. Which just goes to show--do not take on love or any derivative of that word, as you will not prevail.

And on a much smaller scale, there’s the funny little name play with the woman who was in charge of my sons’ religious education at the church we once attended when they were young. Mrs. _____ was appointed with the task of seeing that all children enrolled to be confirmed fulfilled certain obligations, among them to attend services faithfully (there was a checklist just outside of the entrance) as well as special preparation classes that fell, I believe, on Thursday evenings around dinner time. She was not of the warm and fuzzy camp but rather of the strict compliance camp, with a sharp, observing, hawk-like demeanor and a tightly set little mouth. One evening we were all sitting at the table around 6:30 or so eating and talking when the shrill ring of the phone made us all jump. I knew immediately who it was and why they were calling—we had forgotten that our one son was supposed to be at class then. Filled with dread, I went to answer the phone as if responding to a summons and explained the mix up. A pall settled on the dinner table, until we all started laughing. I won’t give the woman’s last name, but will simply say that it rhymed with ditch, hitch, glitch, witch, itch, and a few other words. Isn’t it strange that not one of those words has a pleasant connotation? I’m not saying that this woman could not be warm and engaging—just that the role she chose to play in life was quite the opposite, and that her name seemed to fit it perfectly. Actually, years later one of us ran into her at Target and she politely asked about our son. Very nice. But the name thing still makes me laugh.

Just one more name I feel I must mention—one that has been much in the news lately, in fact one that has been dominating the news for months. The interesting thing about this name is not what it rhymes with (although it does rhyme with and contain the word "rump") but rather what the word means—“a key resource to be used at the opportune moment” and “a reliable or admirable person.” Then again, the next word in the dictionary—that contains the previously alluded to word followed by the letters “ery”—is defined as “showy but worthless finery; nonsense, rubbish; deception, trickery, and fraud.” So which is it? Or more specifically, which is he? I’m thinking that the cosmic message here is that it’s for us, once again, to figure out.