I am a little leery of people with only one name. They do it to themselves. Like Madonna, and Prince, and Bono. They act like they are the only person in the world with that name, and everyone should automatically know who they are. It seems a little self-centered, perhaps. But I guess you can do that if you are a megastar.
Take Madonna, for instance. There are 9,995 people in the United States with the first name, Madonna. And, as for the last name? There are 124 of them. Like, how many times, when they order carry out, do they say their name is Madonna. Then immediately, they have to follow with, “No. Not THAT Madonna.”
Anyway. As far as my name goes, there is only one Polly Kronenberger in the United States at this time. But that sure doesn’t make me a rock star.
To follow through, we have 643 Kronenbergers in the United States and a whopping 36,650 people in the U.S. with the first name Polly.
I didn’t intend to write about names today. I just happened to see that today is Cocco’s birthday, born in 1977. The listing says she is a singer. She’s probably quite good, as she had made it to the “Birthday List” for those with fame, but I’ve never heard of her. And then I happened to think if she had included her last name, it might have made things easier. If Cocco didn’t like her real last name, she might have considered doing something clever, like Cocco Quik.
Ah. Back to those birthdays. There were a lot of notables today again, too, from Dolly Parton to Paula Deen, southern icons with completely different takes on life. I could list them all again, but I just wrote a birthday blog a couple of days ago, and you all probably just stowed away your party hats.
Since I mentioned the South, though, I will also say that it is Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Born in 1807. In Virginia. It seems that Robert’s early life started on the rough side of things. Lee’s father suffered severe financial losses from failed investments. As a result of losing his pants, he was put in debtors’ prison.
He was released a year later, and the family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. They went for a good reason. Robert’s mother, Anna Hill Carter Lee, had family in the area. Not long after that, in 1812, Lee’s father moved permanently to the West Indies.
Eventually, a friend of the family wrote to West Point Academy and was able to get Robert E. Lee a spot there. That was in 1825. He graduated, highly skilled in mathematics, and became a military engineer. For a long time, he served proudly in the United States Army, fighting in many battles, from the Mexican-American War, onward. My point is that he defended the Constitution of the United States for almost 40 years before the Civil War broke out. He had to make a choice between his southern heritage, with his belief that the South had the right to maintain the hold on slavery and defending the U.S. Constitution.
I would just like to point out the similarities here. Loosely. There were a lot of military and police who stormed the Capitol on January 6. I tend to believe this all goes back to white supremacy. Those people have been swallowing the misinformation that has been fed to them. They have decided to turn their backs on the Constitution. They can’t take the fact that 81 million Americans voted to oust their white supremacist president and all he represented for them.
Back to Lee. After the Civil War, he was not arrested or charged with any crimes. He did lose his right to vote, however. Not long after the end of the war, he accepted an offer to serve as the president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, and served from October 1865 until his death.
In 1870, he suffered a stroke and died a few days later. There were unusually heavy rains at that time. They couldn’t get a coffin to him because of terrible flooding. One washed down the Maury River, and some kid found it and lugged it back. They used that one because it was not damaged, but it was too short for Lee. As such, he is buried without his shoes on.
Another name, with another birthday, reflecting in the mirror of the past with the images of today.
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“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.”
― W.C. Fields
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“Names have power.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief
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“If he be Mr. Hyde” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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One name can go a long way, it seems.
