Crenshaw

6

I don’t know where I got the name Crenshaw.

No one in my family has ever known a Crenshaw.

We don’t have any Crenshaw relatives or Crenshaw friends or Crenshaw teachers.

I’d never been to Crenshaw, Mississippi, or Crenshaw, Pennsylvania, or Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles.

I’d never read a book about a Crenshaw or seen a TV show with a Crenshaw in it.

Somehow Crenshaw just seemed right.

Everybody in my family was named after somebody or something else. My dad was named after his grandpa. My mom was named after her aunt. My sister and I weren’t even named after people. We were named after guitars.

I was named after my dad’s guitar. It was designed by a manufacturer called Jackson. My sister was named after the company that made my mom’s guitar.

My parents used to be musicians. Starving musicians is what my mom calls it. After I was born, they stopped being musicians and became normal people. Since they’d run out of instruments, my parents named our dog after a famous singer called Aretha Franklin. That was after Robin wanted to name her Fairy Princess Cutie Pie and I wanted to call her Dog.

At least our middle names came from people and not instruments. Orson and Marybelle were my dad’s uncle and my mom’s great-grandma. Those folks are dead, so I don’t know if they’re good names or not.

Dad says his uncle was a charming curmudgeon, which I think means grumpy with some niceness thrown in.

Honestly, another middle name might have been better. A brand-new one. One that wasn’t already used up.

Maybe that’s why I liked the name Crenshaw. It felt like a blank piece of paper before you draw on it.

It was an anything-is-possible kind of name.