While we were in Elyria for Christmas, I was sitting alone in my folks' kitchen and, for some reason, I was remembering a game my Dad and I used to play. I guess its not so much a game, but he liked to read things backwards and we would do that with signs and headlines and the like. My Dad, if I may say so, has good comedic delivery and he has this intonation he uses to overplay the Being Proud Of Yourself voice. That's the voice he would affect when saying his own name backwards: "Novonod Drofneb!"
"Novonod." Suddenly it hit me: Novonod is Donovon backwards, but only if you spell it with 3 "o"s. Not 2 "o"s and an "a". I had misspelled my son's name.
That's the type of mistake you, as a mother, keep to your damn self. I did'nt tell anyone, not Mike, not Sheryl, nobody. Except my Mom and even that was couched in a question. "How does Dad spell his first name?" She thought a moment. "D-O-N-O-V-O-N." Damn.
Today the phone rang at about 10am. I answered it fully expecting one of those robocalls. Instead it was my very breathless Mother, whose hello to me was "Is that you? Dad spells his name with and "a". Ok? Bye now." I felt like I'd gotten a coded call from the Cold War era KGB.
Nevertheless: WHEW.
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