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***some quick announcements 1) if you’d like to know what kind of looney tune could live on bubble gum, follow me on Twitter @shawnsmucker 2) if you’ve got a pile of books on your night stand you’d like to get through, check out my friend Andi’s post about her summer reading challenge (25 books by Labor Day).  Now, on to Tuesday’s Top Ten.

I’ve had more than my fair share of cavities.  Let’s be honest.  I’ve had teeth pulled, capped, rooted, filled, braced and retained.  There’s not much that hasn’t been done to my teeth (or still needs to be done – anyone doing volunteer root canals?), and I’ve pretty much chalked it up to my love of sugar. 

I think of my college roommate Ryan Swain, now a dentist in Rochester, and I know that he is shaking his head in disappointment.

You may notice the lack of chocolate candy on my list, but I’m just not a big chocolate fan.  I like it, but not as much as the fruity, chewy, pull the teeth from your mouth variety.  I have no idea where this sweet tooth came from, but the following are my top ten favorite kinds of candy:

10) Gigantic Jawbreakers – there were many different types of candy vying for this tenth spot, I’ll be honest.  And I’ll also tell you that Gigantic Jawbreakers are not my personal favorite . . . but when I was young my even younger sister got one of these stuck in her mouth, and ever since then I’ve had a special place in my heart for them (sorry, Shar, if this happened again, now that we’re older, I wouldn’t just put my hand over my mouth and point . . . and laugh . . . – I’d try to help remove it)

9) Pop Rocks – I still remember the first time I tried these, at a roller skating rink when I was about 10, and the explosions they made in my mouth had me hooked, if not for their flavor then their similarity to firecrackers

8) Sour Patch Kids – I also remember the first time I tried Sour Patch Kids: the sourness caused my whole mouth to suck in on itself until I looked like one of the Dementors from Harry Potter.  It was awesome.

7) Blow Pops – these came into our previous discussion regarding top ten types of bubblegum:  Candy?  Good.  Gum?  Good.  Blow Pops?  Good.

6) Nerds – who named these, and what were they thinking?  Somehow this candy overcame one of the dumbest names of all time, of any product, to make my candy hall of fame.  I have an aunt that eats these one at a time . . . and she’s a psychoanalyst . . . I wonder what this tells her about herself?  If you’re brave enough Aunt K, go ahead and comment below and let us in on your mania.

5) Sweet Tarts – one of my old stand-by favorites.  Once I open the pack I cannot rest until I have devoured each and every piece.

4) Skittles – when Maile and I went on our honeymoon we had a long drive to make, something in the realm of 14 hours, and on the trip we would eat Skittles without looking at them and try to guess the flavor.  I think we got through 8 or 9 packs.  To this day Maile will not eat Skittles.  The fact that this excess had no negative impact on my sweet tooth, or my desire for Skittles, will tell you a lot about the depraved level to which I have fallen.

3) Swedish Fish – so many varieties: small, large, grape, orange, lemon, cherry . . . but in junior high I would go to the soccer games and buy the small versions at the snack shop for one penny each.  Do I sound like a grandfather? 

2) Sour Skittles – these would have made number one except recently I ate an entire pack on a long drive and sort of burnt my tongue on the sourness. 

1) Now N Laters – as I look over the rankings I’m beginning to realize that the higher the ranking the more detrimental that particular candy is to tooth structure.  Now N Laters personally sucked at least 2 fillings from my teeth at various points in my life.  Because of this I boycotted them for about ten years.  But I’ve returned to eating them recently, and they’re better than ever.

Honorable Mention:

Laughy Taffy

Watchamacallit

Snickers

Whistle Pops

Ring Pops

Grape Bonkers

Atomic Fireballs

So what did I miss?

***This is a continuing story about how my wife convinced me to name my son on my own, without any of her input – please click here if you would like to read the first post.

I imagined the following situation: some stranger, a really sharp looking guy, comes sliding into the delivery room where my son Samuel has just been born.  He’s a handsome man and all the nurses kind of fawn over him and forget that not just anyone is allowed in the delivery room.  His hair is wavy and dark and he’s tall with broad shoulders.  He’s wearing a buttoned-up shirt with a cardigan sweater vest, expensive eye glasses.  He carries a clipboard and one of those fancy pens. 

Imagine he comes walking firmly over to the side of my wife’s bed, just as I am naming my son.  He stands there and everyone in the room is kind of overwhelmed by his presence, although by now they know he shouldn’t be there.  He smells very good – some expensive cologne – and he doesn’t seem to notice all the mess on those throwaway pads. 

But no one has the guts to tell him to get out. 

And he names my son.  Right after I’ve just named him Samuel.

Imagine that.  

What would I do?  As a father, what would I do?

I can get angry just thinking about that scenario.  Who does this guy think he is, invading our family moment, presuming that he has the right to name my son?  He doesn’t even have the authority to be in the room, much less to choose a name for my son.  I had already named him Samuel!

But it’s not over.  Imagine the years go by, and the name I pronounced over my son is still on his birth certificate.  His social security card.  His driver’s license.  All the legal documents bear evidence to the fact that I named him.

Samuel.

But imagine, after all of those years, he starts thinking about this slick looking guy who named him something else.  Which name would he take?  What if, no matter how much I tried to convince him that he was Sam, he didn’t believe me?  What if, instead of Sam, he started going by that other name, asking people to call him that, writing it on his school papers and tests, and, as he got older, signing it on on his checks and credit card receipts? 

What if, after years and years of going by this other name, he forgot the name I gave him?

It makes me want to weep, all the countless ways that a situation such as this would break my heart.  Perhaps I call him on the phone and he answers.

“Hello?”

“Hey, is this Sam?”

“Sorry, you must have the wrong number.” 

Click.

Maybe I see him on the street, walking down the sidewalk.

“Hey, Sam!” I yell across the traffic.  “Hey, Sam, it’s me!  It’s your dad!”

But he just keeps on walking, disappearing behind a crowd of people, my voice drowned out by the passing cars.

This has, of course, happened to all of us.

But wait, you say.  I haven’t changed my name.  It’s right here on my driver’s license, and my birth certificate, and my social security card.  This is the name I go by.  I would never let anyone else change my name.

I’m not talking about that kind of name. 

The name your parent’s gave you, while well thought out I’m sure, is what I like to call your temporal name.  This is the name attached to your body, your physical presence.  When someone sees you they call out that name and you answer.

There are other kinds of names, the most important of which I’ll call your eternal name.  Most people refer to this as your identity.  This is who you are.  Like the ents in Tolkien’s stories, your eternal name is long and more like a story than a word.  It would take decades to write every facet of it.  It will take you an eternity to unpack it completely, to find every ounce of its meaning.  It is the name given to you by God, and at the great end of time God will reveal this name to you on a white stone.  It will be a new name to you.

Yet many of us have so easily traded in this awesome, glorious name for shoddy, one-word replacements.  At some point in our life someone else has come in and renamed us.  These people come in all shapes and sizes.

An abusive spouse.

An angry parent.

A jealous coworker.

A sarcastic friend.

Many times those around us have stood by and let it happen.  And eventually we took it on as our eternal name, our identity.  The weeks click over into months, which turn into years, then decades, then deathbeds, and all the while we are answering to a name that is not ours.

Ugly.

Addict.

Inadequate.

Failure.

Stupid.

Unoriginal.

Trapped.

Worthless.

Violated.

Irredeemable.

We take these names on and soon we keep them, we guard them.  They become our Precious, because having an identity, any identity, is a requirement for being human.  It’s impossible to not have an identity.  Many folks would rather have a wrong identity than none at all.  You may think you’re one of these people that have no identity, but that’s just because you’ve accepted one of those one-word replacements:

Nobody.

Somewhere out there your eternal name is still in circulation.  Or perhaps I should say, somewhere IN there.  Inside of you, no matter how ingrained this counterfiet name has become, your true name still exists.  You will not regain it easily.  Your ears are not used to hearing it.  Your lungs, once able to scream that name out in defiance to anyone else trying to rename you, have not been used in such a long time.  There is only one way to regain that name.

Just as Sam had to be born in order to get his name, you must be reborn in order to experience this eternal name.  Every lie the world has tried to tell you about yourself, you must forget.

And when you pass through that anguish, when you break free from that cocoon and come screaming out into the light, you will feel this newness wrap around you.  You will feel a face draw close to your ear and speak with a clarity you could not have imagined possible.  The sharpness of those tones will at first make you want to draw back.

But don’t move away.

Listen carefully.

Feel the warm breath against your cheek.

He will whisper your eternal name in your ear, and you will remember it.  You will feel amazed that you ever believed in those one-word replacement names.  You will bask in the joy of finally knowing who you are. 

And behind you the nurse will hold up a twisted umbilical cord.

“A miracle child,” they will say, gathering in a huddle around the evidence.

***

To continue reading, click HERE

There is nothing in the world like seeing your child come sliding out.  Apparently to Maile it didn’t feel like sliding, what with all the yelling and the pushing and the blood, but from my vantage point that little guy just took his time and came slipping into the world (I am going to be in trouble for that sentence – this may be my last blog post). 

Anyway, the baby came out and it was a boy and I felt those seeds of tears forming in the corners of my eyes and my nose went all runny and I couldn’t really talk, had to keep clearing my throat (which kept constricting and had this achey feeling deep inside of it).  He was finally there, and the nurse put him, all original and slimy and beautiful, up on Maile’s chest.

They squeegied his nose and his ears and patted his back and patted his back and at first he wouldn’t cry and we waited, those agonizing moments when you can’t help but panic and hope that these lungs that have never breathed air before will kick in.  I held my breath while he held his. 

Finally, a thousand decades later, like an engine in the middle of winter, those lungs roared to life, and he screamed and screamed and that brought a fresh batch of tears to our eyes in thankfulness and this desire to comfort him.  Suddenly we didn’t want him to cry anymore. 

Just then the placenta came out (sorry if this is grossing you out but you’ll see there is a purpose to the madness).  The midwife had this look of awe on her face, like a child finding their first quarter in the street.  She held up the baby’s umbilical cord and it was in a perfect knot. 

“You have yourself a miracle baby,” she said solemnly, kind of getting choked up herself.  You see, we had so many scans with this baby because he only had one artery in his umbilical cord, not the typical two (the second is an emergency backup).  And now we realized that not only was he a single-artery umbilical baby, but at some point he had swam through a loop in his cord – any tighter and he would have been stillborn. The other nurses all came over to look at the knot and touch it, like ancient people seeing the shadow of an eclipse on the ground for the first time. 

At that point I thought our miracle baby had gone long enough without a name, so I leaned over to Maile’s ear and, while she was feeding him for the first time, I whispered the name.

Samuel James.

She loved it.

Those first few weeks passed in the usual blur of sleep deprivation combined with work and raising three other children.  Some mornings I woke up and it felt like someone had poured a bucket of sand in my eyes, they were so itchy and red from lack of sleep.  Some evenings we could barely make it up the steps to our bedroom – the landing seemed like a perfectly logical place to lie down and go to sleep.

Yet the naming process had not finished its work in me.  Samuel was named, the birth certificate our witness.  Maile was happy with my choice.  Sam, however indifferent, seemed satisfied.  But for some reason I couldn’t get that whole idea out of my head, that I had named him, that I had chosen the sound that he would answer to, for the rest of his life.

Then, one day, as I was reflecting (again) on Samuel’s birth, a strange thought came into my head.  What if, right after I had named him, someone else came into the room and tried to name him something else?

And what would I have done if my son, Samuel James, decided he would start answering to that name?

* * * * *

To continue reading, click HERE

“I started to establish the present, and the present moved on.  What I established is already buried under layers of tape.  Before I can say I am, I was.”

Wallace Stegner’s crippled main character Lyman Ward begins speaking his family history into an old recorder, the contents of which will be put on paper by a typist.  But what he discovers in researching and telling the story of his grandparent’s moving west is an uncomfortable reflection of his own existence.

Stegner seems irrepressibly drawn to write about the couple where the husband is strong and quiet and servile in his love for his wife, and the wife is strong and spirited and will not be denied.  “Angle of Repose” does not depart from this, and the love between Lyman’s grandparents is stunning at times, and uncomfortable at others.

Somehow Stegner manages to tell the story of four generations, their interweaving, and their diversion.  This epic novel captures what it was like to move west in the late 1800s, what it was like to have a family then, to leave your roots and, in a more intense way than we can ever do in the 21^st century, start again.

And yet this is the where the trouble lies – the constant moving on is inevitable, no matter what generation we are in. 

“We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford these abandonings,” Stegner writes.

If you love to read, you need to get“Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner on your bedside table stack.

* * * If you want to read the post that leads up to this one, read here first

“What?” I asked my wife.  I still wasn’t sure if I had heard her correctly.

“Yes!” my wife said, her eyes gleaming like the eyes of Dr. Frankenstein when the monster sat up.  “You name the baby and don’t tell me until it comes out.  I don’t want to know anything.  No hints, no questions.  Totally your call.”

This felt like a trap.

“Yeah, right!  What if you hate the name?”

“I won’t hate the name!  I promise.  I’ll love it because you’ll have put a lot of thought into it and it will be the right name for this child.”

“Oh man, I don’t know.”

Somehow, and for some uknown reason, I agreed to this crazy experiment.  She told all of our friends, and they would stare, eyes open, as if she had told them she was joining a convent, or that she believed in Santa Claus.  The guys would pat me on the back, shaking their heads in amazement that I had taken this on. 

“So do you have any ideas?” they would ask sympathetically.

I just sighed, and my mouth took that scribbled up-and-down shape of Charlie Brown’s mouth when he was confused.

The pressure was on.

Many times during the following months I poured through baby name books, making a list for boys and girls, cross-referenced with possible middle names.  Don’t forget to check the meanings.  Don’t forget to check if the potential initials spell something unfortunate.  As the process progressed, I would have my doubts.

“Are you sure you want me to do this?” I would ask her.

“I’m positive,” she would say, and I could tell she meant it.  She didn’t want to have any part in it, and she was beginning to like the idea of the surprise.

“What if it’s a boy and I name him Ebenezer?”

“Adorable!  We’ll call him Ben.”

“What if it’s a girl and I name her Cleopatra?”

“You had a dog named Cleopatra,” she said.  “You wouldn’t do that.”

True, I thought. 

“But doesn’t that worry you?  I named a dog Cleopatra.  That should worry you.”

She just smiled.

“No hints,” she said.  “I want it to be a surprise.”

So we came down to the final weeks.  The final days.  I thought I had the names nailed down.  I was ready.

* * * * *

To read the next part of the story, click HERE

Before I get into the important part of today’s post, just know that I am now a tweeting twitterer.  @shawnsmucker.  I still don’t really know how it works.  Or where these things go.  But I’m giving it a shot.

Anyway, on to an over-140-character communique.

I love bubblegum.  I think – I think – that if given the chance I could survive on it.  Eating nothing else.  Just bubblegum.

But while I won’t take the time to argue (or try out) that premise, the following are my top ten types of bubblegum, in particular order:

10) Bazooka – even though these small rectangular pieces of gum needed to be warmed up in your hands before they were soft enough to chew, they came with small comics to help you pass the time.

9) Juicy Fruit – for some reason, nothing reminds me more of childhood birthday parties than Juicy Fruit bubblegum.  Go figure.

8) Fruit Stripe Gum – perhaps the most unique tasting bubblegum on the list, both for the actual flavor itself as well as for the absurdly small amount of time the flavor lasted.  But since uniqueness counts for something on Top Ten Tuesday, I’m putting it at #8.

7) Big Red – this was my mother’s bubblegum of choice; I probably love this gum because its sugar-filled juice was leaking in through my umbilical cord when I was in the womb.

6) Bubble Tape – Bubblegum Flavor – what could be better than a gum that allows you, the childhood chewer, to decide exactly how large that piece can be (up to 6 feet)?  Better yet, take the whole thing out of the package and simply gnaw out a bite-sized chunk.

5) Bubbalicious (Watermelon) – this is summer deliciousness in a small paper wrapper.

4) Hubba Bubba (Strawberry) – my affinity for Hubba Bubba gum comes from the fact that 1) it tastes amazing, and 2) Hubba Bubba was our family password when I was young – this was initiated in the early 80s and I think America’s Most Wanted was responsible.  Did anyone else have a family password, or was my childhood stranger than I thought?

3) Chiclets – tiny, crunchy, chewy pieces of sugar-laced awesome

2) Big League Chew (Bubblegum Flavor) – nothing made me feel more like a real, live Major League Baseball player when I was kid than stuffing a bunch of this shredded gum into the space between my lips and my teeth, as if I were Lenny Dykstra and it was chewing tobacco.  Nothing, that is, except . . .

1) Big League Chew (Grape) – a few weeks ago I had some Grape BLC for the first time in YEARS.  Usually, when you experience or taste something from childhood that you always loved, there is something about it that has diminished or doesn’t feel quite the same.  Fruit Stripe bubblegum is like this.  Grape BLC is not like this.  It was better than ever. 

Honorable Mentions: 

Double Bubble

Wrigley’s Spearmint

Trident – Cinnamon

So what’s your favorite bubblegum of all time?