WHAT"S IN A NAME?

I think it was Shakespeare that didn't think a name was very important. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet," he wrote. Correct me if I'm wrong.

How a human can remember the names of everything they know and everybody they know is beyond me. And we remember the names of people we saw in movies or TV or on the Post Office Wanted Posters. I have to confess, I am beginning to have a hard time remembering names of famous people due to old age. My old age, not their's.

I said to my hubby once a long time ago, "I don't like telling anybody that my name is Smith."

"People think I'm lying."

Smith is your name, not mine! How would you like to have to have my maiden surname as your last name just because you married me?"

He wasn't going to bothered with such a silly question, so I got no comment. Things have changed for the better in today's world!!!

Well, what if his last name had been Temple, and my first name was Shirley? I'd have to go around telling people that my name was Shirley Temple, and I would die of embarrassment.

Or what if his last name had been Mylzinkomakovich? If someone asked me my name, I would just say, "None of your beeswax!" Or "Who wants to know?" Or lie and say "Mary Jones."

Anyway, I wanted my own name back, but of course, I couldn't get it. Then something wonderful happened! I saw my grandmother's death certificate dated April, 1910 and her father's name was written on it. His name was Smith!!

I am entitled to the name Smith even if he didn't marry my grandmother's mother. His appendix ruptured and he died before they could tie the knot. Well, that's one story, anyway. So I feel a little better now about using the Smith name. Of course, maybe they just put Smith on the death certificate and it wasn't true at all. But then, "What's in a name?"

GROUND BEEF

When I was nine, my mother tied a dime into a hanky and pinned it to my dress and sent me off to a grocery store two blocks away to buy a pound of ground beef. Yes, a dime! Not only was meat cheap but was wrapped in paper that I could use later to draw my pretty ladies on. Even the string was saved and was tied to a big ball of string saved from former grocery purchases.

I remember getting a candy bar once in a while, too, and the real, honest-to-goodness tin foil that it was wrapped in was also saved and added to the ball of tin foil that my brother claimed. When the ball of tin foil got heavy enough, it could be sold for some very scarce stuff----money. Talk about recycling!

Fast forward a few years. The price of ground beef went up, of course, and it was scarce. If my mother gave me some money to buy a pound of ground beef, I would also need to have a little stamp torn out of a ration book, or I could not buy a pound of ground beef or any other meat. The meat went, rightly, to the armed forces first and then to the civilians. Gasoline was severely rationed, too, along with coffee and sugar, if memory serves.

My father learned to make a good hamburger probably when he was a cook's helper in the First World War. Today you get a rather dry patty wrapped in a rather dry bun, but in those days you dredged the bun in the frying pan grease that came from the meat that was still holding on to some of its fat and along with french fried potatoes cooked in real lard, you had something that you wouldn't believe could taste so good.

I don't remember seeing very many obese people like you see today, because even it you ingested lard, you didn't have as much to eat as people usually do today. Oh, yes, there were people who were bottomless pits, so they loaded up on potatoes and bread and put on the pounds. A couple of ladies in my neighborhood must have weighed three hundred pounds, more or less. But they didn't live long lives.

But my skinny, little fat-free grandmother lived to be eighty-seven.