Stephanie Bauman

Cary Academy

Crowned In a Far Away Land

My name is as long and unique as a peacock’s tail feather. It takes up too much room on the corner of my paper and takes too long to write in a hurry, but no other name would fit me. My mom wanted to name me Lillian Hailey. My friends say I don’t look like a Lillian.

My parents named me Stephanie after the S in my deceased Grandmother Sylvia’s name. She sounded like a pretty amazing women, unfortunately she is deceased and I never had the chance to meet her. Shaindle is my Hebrew name. It is two perfectly cut pieces of glass sliding together to make a crisp and clean noise. It is the kind of noise that colliding wind chimes make during a hurricane, yet soft and peaceful like in the eye of the storm.

I like the way that Stephanie is launched into the air like a catapult when people are trying to get my attention in a crowd though I don’t care for the sharp striking sounds that the t and ie make when people are mad, angry, and upset. Stephanie carries a ring as it travels through the air and sounds as if all of the letters of the alphabet jumble in people’s mouths and just happens to come out in the right order. My name is an old car making its way over a hill in bustling San Francisco, going through the high and the low stages of life that my name brings out in each syllable. Most of my friends have nicknames or shortened versions of their names that sound charming and girly when they are flowing through the hall and bouncing off of lockers, but to me Steph, Stephy, and Ste-Fanny all sound boring and don’t role of the tongue like Jess or Lindz. My name sounds fragile and untouched like a drying art project, but I am different from unpredictable shades. I ‘m not blessed with the mysteriousness of drying paint colors. I am the forecaster, trying to find the answers in the Ouija board that will solve all of my problems.

          Stephanie comes from Greek and means crowned. Maybe I was supposed to be of noble birth in a far away land where flowers blossom as fast as a pot of coffee is made and where the horses gallop as fast as a subway can get you to work, but the stork that carried me here to the front door made a mistake and here I am on earth and in sync with reality.