Across the Field
by Katherine Arthaud

I guess it is inevitable that most of us end up with middle names. I don’t know about you, but when I was a child I was much more aware of my middle name than I am now. I don’t suppose it is the same if you are a man. What seems to happen, as many of you who are women well know, is that when you get married, you often take your husband’s name, and voila, your new middle name is suddenly your old last name, which is suddenly called your “maiden” name, and what happened to your middle name? ...Well, Virginia, it just kind of sits there...in the background...scarcely ever acknowledged by so much as an initial on an envelope. I don’t know about you, but back when I was in elementary school, middle names were a menace, an ever-present, usually under-the-radar source of face-flushing embarrassment. Because the thing is: you knew your own middle name, you knew your siblings’ middle names, you might even know your parents’ middle names (my mother’s was Fredrieke, if you can believe that one), and sometimes you knew your very best friends’ middle names...but generally, you didn’t know most kids’ middle names...not until some all-school assembly gathering or another would reveal them, out loud, usually mic-enhanced. I well remember the horror and the hilarity that would fill the room when whatever school official would read out a list of children’s names with the full, sometimes impossibly funny, middle names thrown right out there where all could hear, and enjoy, God help us. My poor friend Sandy (she now prefers to be called Alexandra) had one of the more unfortunate middle names among us. Bradish. Good God, what were her parents thinking? Thankfully, she was a strong girl who could stand up pretty well to the teasing that inevitably followed any mention of that one. My sister’s middle name was Louise, a name I quite like now, but which back then seemed unbelievably stupid and frumpy—my sister would agree. As for me, the only time I so much as utter my middle name nowadays is when my children ask me what it is, or was. I always tell them that my middle name is the middle name of 75 percent of the American female population. I suppose I should thank my parents for picking such an innocuous, such a short one. Think about it, it could have been Bradish—and I did not, believe me, have the chutzpah back then to defend myself. So, thank you, Mom and Dad, for taking it easy on me in this respect. It could have been a lot worse. And, come to think of it, when it came to naming my own children, I am proud and happy to say that their father and I chose for them fairly un-embarrassing ones as well. They might disagree, but I am telling you, back in my time, there were some real doozies.
But my point in bringing up middle names is really not to reflect upon the tension that gathered in the auditoriums of yesteryear when it came to the revelation of names-in-full. My point is to talk about the middle name that I almost forget these days is mine. Ann. I was working on a sermon a few weeks ago on the topic of forgiveness, and that is what made me remember it. Remember her. Remember that I was given that short-and-sweet middle name by my parents not randomly, but to honor the daughter of their good friends and neighbors, the Kouwenhovens. As the story goes, Ann Kouwenhoven was a freshman at Smith College back in the late fifties. One day she went flying in a small plane with a beau (as my parents referred to him). At one point, the young man got to showing off, and he flew the plane too low and hit some telephone wires. The plane crashed, killing Ann but not the young man.
That was most of what I was told as a child when I would ask why I had the middle name that I had. But the other part of the story that I got thinking about the other day, as I pondered the sermon on forgiveness, was how, days after the accident, John and Eleanor Kouwenhoven (John was my godfather), still in the depths of shock and grief from the death of their only daughter, visited the young man in his hospital room to tell them that they forgave him.
Recently I heard the term “radical forgiveness.” I think that is what I was writing about when I thought about this story. Radical forgiveness.
What is there that is so appealing, so satisfying at some level, about holding a grudge? About feeling righteously angry? About feeling clearly wronged? Wrongs happen, and very bad things happen to very good people. That we all know. Things happen in life that cause real and very painful wounds. They often come out of the blue, and they are so hard to deal with. And the natural response—and believe me, I know this—is to get upset, to get angry to feel wronged, robbed, stricken, victimized, paralyzed with grief. These are probably healthy responses, in a sense, to bad things happening that we cannot control. But there is something so powerful about a story like the one about those two grieving parents—who must have felt so devastated, so robbed, so stricken, so deeply angry and dismayed—but who managed somehow to get up off their couch, get out the door and into the car, and head to that hospital, to that room where that young man, who had flown that plane into those wires, unintentionally but nevertheless recklessly, causing the death of their precious, smart, beautiful, irreplaceable daughter, lay.
What is your middle name, I wonder... For me, it is and will always be, no matter whom I marry or however many times I might change my name, Ann. I never knew her. She was gone before I began. But remembering it, remembering her, remembering the story behind that short word, I will carry my near-invisible middle name around with me, more aware, I hope, that it is there. Like a feather stuck to the back of my parka. Like a forgotten dime in the back pocket of my jeans. Ann. A mother and a father entering that hospital room. Looking into the young man’s eyes; how did they do it? We forgive you. We forgive you.
Ann. It is a very small word. Here, I will take it out for you, to show you on this fall day. A white down feather, a shiny silver dime. A reminder of one of the most empowering, life-changing, world-changing, universe-transforming actions that a human being can take on her/his very own. I forgive you. Let’s move on. In peace.