George Who?

George? George who?

My recent adventure with the medical profession continually revealed a deep, dark secret I’ve kept for my whole life – my first name is George and the Michael I’m so comfortable with is actually my middle name.

Before anyone starts in with the fact George Michael is a singer from the 1980s I plead the fifth. I didn’t listen to that George Michael even when he was in Wham. I discount this anomaly because I had the name a good 10 years before he did and mine is on my birth certificate while his is a stage Americanization of his Greek moniker, which doesn’t roll off the tongue as smoothly.

I have to confess it wasn’t a Greek post disco singer that made me abandon my first name. It was a nursery rhyme:

Georgie Porgie, Puddin' and Pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry,

When the boys came out to play

Georgie Porgie ran away

I’m not sure why my first name was chosen for the rhyme but I’m evidently not the only one who didn’t like sharing a name with a kid’s poem. George Bernard Shaw, a real poet, didn’t like it according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia theorizes, though admittedly unsubstantiated, the name is traditional in families which supported the Stuart line to the English throne, that this is an old Jacobite rhyme that relates to the 1745 rebellion of mainly Scots. In this account the rhyme relates to King George II. It incorrectly implies that as the Jacobite army headed further and further south ("When the boys came out to play"), King George fled England for the safety of mainland Europe ("Georgie Porgie ran away"). Similarly, the convention of using "ie" instead of "y" or "ey" at the end of words is prevalent in Scotland.

This poem was the reason the annual revelation on the first day of school of my actual first name was an ordeal. The teacher would always call the roll and come to George Hallmark. I would either correct her that I went by Mike or else simply say, “Who?” The boys in the class would always pipe up something smart, usually the first lines of the darn poem. The name sounded foreign even on my own tongue and when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see a George. It was better than being a boy named Sue but not by much.

George was my grandfather’s name and as I learned later in life a long-standing family name dating back to Original George, the first ancestor in America. Yet as far as my memory goes I’ve always been Mike. I don’t know if the poem somehow traumatized me or if my parents just called me by my middle name. My mother said there weren’t many Mikes in the Texas Panhandle when I was born though I’ve encountered a bunch in my lifetime. In retrospect, George might have been a more unique name to carry.

If George is a family name there is a possibility the family name isn’t Hallmark. Original George Hallmark was illegitimate when born in 1742 and took the name of his mother. The reputed father’s last name was Candiland, so overall I prefer the family name I inherited. Georgie Porgie Candiland would really have gotten me beaten up on the schoolyard.

Original George wasn’t actually the original George Hallmark as there are records of one born in 1652 and 1715. My Original George came over from England as a 14 year old who had been caught stealing a handkerchief with a few shillings in it. There was no home for juvenile delinquents in the mid 1700s so George was sent to America as an indentured servant for seven years to work out the sentence for his transgression. Young George was rehabilitated enough to prosper in America under English rule. He sold horses to the Revolutionary Army and had trouble getting paid. He eventually was awarded a parcel of land in East Tennessee as payment that made him a landowner. There are records of him helping start a Baptist Church and serving as clerk, so his transgression with the handkerchief was obviously behind him. Original George moved to Alabama late in life and died near Decatur. The largest contingent of people named Hallmark is in that area, so evidently George went forth and multiplied.

I didn’t know about Original George growing up, I knew I was named for my grandfather, George Lee Hallmark. George Lee was born in 1880 in Ellis County Tx, the son of the wanderlust Hallmarks who walked from Alabama to Texas for that elusive opportunity. I was told my grandfather was pleased I had been named after him and he was going to come up to the Panhandle to see me when he died in Brownwood, Tx at the age of 73, three months after I was born. I always felt cheated by not getting to know him and maybe that’s why I went by my middle name.

I’ve gone through my whole life as Michael Hallmark. Most of my credit is under that name. But it’s getting increasingly harder and harder to keep George a secret.

Things started with 9-11 and airlines requiring the first name on the drivers’ license to be used by travellers. So, I started travelling as George Hallmark. No ticket agent or TSA pat down artist seemed to care I didn’t go by that name.

When I started teaching adjunct at Union University, I had to fill out my entire name and George Hallmark got attached as the instructor to all my classes. So now all my students know the secret without need of roll call.

The latest surfacing of George Hallmark was on every medical form I filled out. During tests for my malady, the doctor or nurse would come in and stick out his or her hand and say, “You must be George....”

“Uh, no…,” I would reply uneasily.

The final straw came when surgery had been determined as the best course. I was lying on the gurney in a backless number wearing yellow knee socks with ridges on top and bottom to avoid slippage. The anesthesiologist came to me and said, “Are you George Hallmark?”

“George, who?” I asked, feigning puzzlement just before Lalaland kicked in.