NON-FICTION: Lucy Stoners

"Lucy Stone: in her lifetime, achieved a number of important "firsts" for which we can remember her. She was the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She even achieved a "first" at death, by being the first person in New England to be cremated. She's remembered most for one first: being the first woman in the United States to keep her own name after marriage."

I am not a Lucy Stoner, and I don't know if there is a moniker for women who take their husbands name and later, take their father's back, when, thwack, the husband is no longer in question.

I WAS the first person in my family to earn a masters degree.

I was sentimental about names, took the name Keefer for my father-in-law really, conjured respect I guess it was, so he could have grandchildren with his name. I wasn't a Stepford manikin, I had thoughts about it, it was a question, a question my foremothers never asked. But it because of them that I asked it at all, and probably following the lead of my eldest sister, I took John's family name, as she took her John's family name, Nolan. This can be a tricky thing. Now my sister has her new husband's name, and her daughter, from another man, has John Nolan's name.

Later, I learned this chant: I am Kathryn, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Mary, daughter of Margaret, daughter of Sarah. But then I lose Delia. Delia Douglas nee Mitchell. Daughter of Ganley. So I am Kathryn, daughter of Robert, son of Delia, daughter of Brigid.

I am also many things. Poet, administrator, Mom. Networker, sometimes hermit, but I can work a crowd. I can work strangers. When I walk the 3/4 miles from my car to work it is a veritable gauntlet of street people, friends, students, merchants that I must greet. And it is at these times that I practice love and kindness, practice treating everyone the same, pretending that we are all part of the same one. I learned this somewhere along these lines of naming.

My father's name, Douglas, is a Scottish name. But my grandfather, Louis, or Ludavich, changed the name from Dlugasz, a Polish name, when he came to New York from the small town of Brody, now part of the Ukraine.

What's in a name?

I was so young when I got married, that I didn't really lose my professional self with the name change, as is often an issue. There was no professional self at the time. There was a human woman bent on making babies, and so she did. With a little help.

Margaret Manley, Mary Ryan, Margaret Gleason, Sarah Malarky. Malarky is funny. One can be full of malarkey, and so my foremothers and forefathers must have inspired this joke. Seems to fit.

Back and back. Can't duck the assignations or genetics, salt from earth that I feel, from all quarters. The mixing up of it. William Keefer's DNA, from Raymond whom I loved more. Grandpa, who watched John and I build a pool deck for the family saying, "I love to watch a woman work." He had eyes for me.

Bill was another story.

I remember him announcing one drunken night in front of the tv that he was a "leg man," daring John, I think, to announce what kind of man he was. Like the elephant in the room, there my breasts were. I am more known for my breasts, so not sure if he was asking if John was a "breast man," but John didn't say.