Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

My family nickname for a long time was Little Man, then simply Little. Who knows why? I recall my mother once saying that, even as a kid, I had the demeanor of an old person: serious, morose, not quick to smile, always with my face pressed into a book. But, as fitting as it might have been as a kid, as a young adult, I began to tire of the psychology of diminution.

At holiday gatherings, it was Little Man say the blessing; or are you dating anyone Little?; or Little Man remember that time we secretly tied your sneakers and you fell and tripped running to the school bus?

The family moniker fixed me to a long-ago age. I felt reduced. No one saw that I had grown well beyond their memories of me. I commuted to a job every morning where coworkers depended on my punctual performance. I wasn’t the cute little kid anymore who merely behaved like an adult; I was an adult.

One night at a bar, I told my younger cousins I no longer wish to be called Little Man; my name is Major. They heard me, but only for an hour, then fell back to calling me Little, except for one cousin. She called me Man.

Today’s poem riffs off a childhood name, to caravan us to all the possibilities of association which brings the speaker back to the uniqueness and individual nature of their being.

Ode to Bones
by Lynne Thompson

My brothers gave child-me the nickname Bones
presumably because, when they looked at me,
they thought she is nothing but skin and _____.

The playwright Titus Plautus gets the credit,
earned or otherwise, for saying your name is
your destiny but what, after all, can Romans 

tell us today? Suppose instead that a name is
the past come to build a bridge to cross over?
If this is true, I could be bones of my parents’

beloved Carib birds: a lesser Antillean tanager,
Cuban grassquit, Jamaican crow; the bones of 
ancestors stolen from Africa: the Hottentot teal,

brown booby. Or maybe after all, all bones are
just playing into the game as in the game of
dominoes where the goal is to get the die from

the boneyard. On the other hand, it could be 
that music makes all the difference: this old
man, he played one . . . give a dog a bone . . . this

old man, he played five . . . with a knick-knack
paddy whack . . . and never forget to look in your
kitchen — to put bones in your stock, bones to

add flavor to a mirepoix: calcium, phosphorous,
magnesium; to use a boning knife to separate
the flesh of the salmon or trout or bass. Their

bones may be as small as yours or mine: stapedius
(to keep the voices in your head from driving 
you crazy) or as large as the femur or tibia, each

fighting for supremacy.

"Ode to Bones" by Lynne Thompson. Used by permission of the poet.