What's in a name?

Shakespeare said it best. "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
It's really very interesting, this notion of a name. We attach everything about ourselves to it, and thus it becomes who we are. Names can also carry around a great deal of history, which have a way of defining you in terms of the people who came before you. Have you ever ran into a person you haven't seen in a long time, and you start associating them with all those old memories you have, only to find out that they got married and have a new last name? Something changes a little, doesn't it? Suddenly you feel like you've just met someone for the first time and really don't know anything at all about the person standing in front of you.
I have spent some time thinking about names lately, mainly because I just got married and, you guessed it, my last name officially changed. Months before the wedding I was really having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that I would no longer be a Plucker. It was somewhat of a surreal feeling, because not a single thing about my personality was changing, but it felt like I was going to become an entirely different person. I'm not really sure what I was expecting....a total metamorphosis or just a subtle change of being, but I couldn't help feeling I was losing a piece of my identity.

I had spent 25 years becoming Carrie Plucker. In the eyes of my family, my friends, and me, this was who I was and essentially would always be. I was possessive of that name, I was familiar with that name, and I knew who I was with that name. For me, it wasn't just the notion that other people wouldn't know who I was, I was almost afraid that I wouldn't know myself.

After being married now for four months and practicing my new signature over and over so that it now feels like second nature, I think I have embraced my new name of Carrie Neppel. But that doesn't mean I have given up or lost any of the characteristics which made me Carrie Plucker. Sometimes when I smile really big my left eye will close itself just a bit farther than my right, something discernible in both my father and my grandfather. I am still stubborn, which is true of just about every member of the Plucker family, and I still possess the Plucker nose. I have a sneaking suspicion my bunions might grow back, a gift bestowed on me by my father, aunt and great-aunt.

We start out as a person with a name. A name given to us by other people but which links us to a shared history, a shared past, of people and family whom we look at in black and white pictures and try to imagine as real as we are. Upon that name evolves a plethora of characteristics unique to ourselves, so that while we may look like those who came before us we become another branch, a new extension. We become our own person. In the end it's like Shakespeare said about the proverbial rose, and by another name we will still maintain everything we have always been. These days I may sign my name differently, but a new configuration of letters hasn't taken anything away from me.