bellascribe

There was a wedding. A celebration, with a 70-some-years-old DJ, perhaps Jewish, who wore suspenders and trousers that not quite but almost were raised to his armpits and who played a great deal of rap music with which I was not familiar and to which I would not be able to move to, certainly, with his cool. My father was disturbed that the DJ had so much trouble during his emceeing (there was a talent show/pageant/psuedo celebrity ball — I’m guessing — feel to things) pronouncing our last name, a monosyllabic word that also names a common noun. It could be Stone, for example. Or Hall. White or Black. You get the idea: a word you learned to read in first or second grade, by the latest. “For a name so easy pronounce…I just can’t understand how anybody could get that wrong,” my dad said several times. Later that night as everyone sat around my parents’ kitchen table analyzing the event [to death], in reference to the DJ’s mispronounciations [again!] I reminded my father that he, himself a bored retiree, had been looking for some sort of part-time employment, to which my mother rolled her eyes while his seemed to light up.