When Reagan was born, I was happy, as happy as any not-quite-two-year-old who’s not-quite-aware of what’s going on can be expected to be. By the time Felt was born, I was five and full of feelings – most prominently a true appreciation for the balloons and candy cigars his birth elicited.

I am seven now, and my parents recently announced the arrival of another baby. I had not given it too much thought until this morning, when the baby was born, and I was informed that it was a boy.

I am consciously confused. Baffled. Perplexed. Bewildered. I may not know the words for the feeling, but they are written all over my face.

I believe my exact response was: “Are you sure?” Another boy? Really? Why? We already have two.

But of course, they were sure – in an annoying, parental sort of way.

I was not so easily convinced. We were driving home from school, pulling into the garage, and I was staring at the ascending garage door, mulling over the news, wondering how this had happened.

Perhaps a mistake had been made — if not by the hospital (and these things happen. I am seven; I have heard of switched-at-birth stories by now), then by God Himself (I haven’t heard of so many mistakes-by-God stories, but I have already developed the strong suspicion that I am an exception to the rules and principles that govern other people.)

The odds of there being a mistake were slim, I decided after a moment’s consideration, and then sheer confusion set in. I did not understand how this God, if He was everything my parents said He was, could in good conscience (which God surely ought to have) give a person three brothers and no sisters. The numbers just did not add up – and if I, a seven-year-old, could do the math, shouldn’t God have been able to, too?

“Didn’t God invent math?” I asked my father. Knowing my father as I do, I suspect he assumed that I had moved on from my dismay over the baby’s gender and was now tackling theological issues; he was probably beaming with pride at the blossoming prodigy in the back seat. Little did he know. My father answered with an enthusiastic affirmation about God and math. He said more – Ptolemy and Euclid and so forth – but I stoppped listening; I was again absorbed in getting to the bottom of this now-cosmically-important problem.

We piled out of the car — me and the hoard of brothers I already had– and into the house to meet the new baby. After a few moments of holding him, all my disappointment has been dispelled.

It is possible, I suppose, that I might retain a very slight sense of injury — being the only girl with so many brothers. I might be the sort of person who, for years to come, will mentally calculate the sibling ratio (boys to girls) of every girl I meet. I may even track it so often that it becomes part of my subconscious, until one day in high school I catch myself. Such things are possible, I suppose.

In case you are wondering: three children and seven years have cooled much of the political fire my parents once had, and they have compromised on the baby’s name: Lincoln Michael Wayne. It’s as respectable a name as any — everybody loves Lincoln.

So there you have it: Celery, Reagan, Roosevelt and Lincoln. They are, without a doubt, names more fitting for a pack of basset hounds than humans, but anyway. The deed is done.

We are back in America, and my parents have bought me a piano so I can practice. Or at least touch the instrument.

My grandmother, called Yia-Yia since she is Greek (as am I, as fate would have it), took us shopping at a piano store near her house. In my entire life, I have never seen such a thing: a huge room with rows and rows of pianos – every shape and size, and several colors. The baby blue baby grand was not an option; my mother made that clear immediately.

I left my mother and Yia-Yia with the salesman to take care of the grown-up side of things, which involved standing still and nodding a lot, and I wandered off. I dragged my fingers along the pianos as I passed them, soaking in the cacophony with sheer delight.

Up and down the rows I went, making my own music, wondering how long I would be allowed to do it for. Not long, as it turned out. My mother heralded me back shortly.

“What about this one, Celery?” she asked. The salesman gaped at my name. Yia-Yia flinched. (“So many good names, and you pick Celery!” “It’s from a Greek word, Mother!” “For parsley!” But with a hrmph of consolation).

It is an old dark brown upright piano. There are some dings in the wood, and the keys are worn in a few places. It is deliciously out of tune, as well, and I fell in love with it at once. It isn’t a shiny grand piano, looking like plastic and smudge-able, but it seems so wonderfully dear, so worn and friendly. And the piano bench opens up so you can keep the books inside it.

“That’s so smart!” I cheered.

We bought it. (And, yes, now I know that all piano benches open like that.)

 As much as I love that piano, so much do I hate playing it. Hate is a strong word, and I really mean it.

It’s become a household fiasco to get me to sit down on the brilliantly-designed bench for 20 minutes a day.

My mother started shutting the living room doors, corralling the boys into the back rooms; no one is allowed to talk to me for 20 minutes. I am not allowed out until she hears me playing. Cry, whine, sob, and moan as I might, there is no escape. My mother is a tower of strength, I tell you. Immovable.

“You wanted to learn piano, and so you have to keep it up,” she says. And when that doesn’t work: “One day you’ll be glad you learned it.” (Between you and me, I have my doubts about that one.)

Twenty whole minutes. A small eternity. But so it goes. Every day. And I have learned to play piano. “Chopsticks,” “Little Brown Jug,” “Minuet in D,” and Beethoven’s Fifth. Okay, maybe not that last one.

Mrs. Evans, who lives moderately close to my house and has an infant daughter named Clara, is my piano teacher. Everyone I know who takes piano lessons (which is just about everyone I know) takes them from Mrs. Evans, and she says we will have a recital every year.

My first recital was last week.

I wore a pale blue dress with some kind of sash around the waist; my absolutely untamable hair had been brushed down and barretted back; and I got new patent leather shoes for the occasion. I have decided that any occasion that gets you new patent leather shoes is a good one.

I played a song called “Clouds” which was supposed to sound like clouds would sound if clouds made sounds. I am more or less completely mystified by the idea of attributing sound to silent items (clouds, chopsticks, fur coats for a girl named Elise, and so on), but everyone else seems to think it’s okay, so I’ve been going along with it.

All of the children who were performing sat in the front in neat little rows, in the order that we were playing. Once the person on your right went up, you knew that you were next. When that person came and sat down, you got up and went to the piano. It was pretty straight-forward.

When it was my turn, I took my sheet of music up, and sat down at the piano. I positioned the seat as I had been instructed to do, and rested my hands on the piano. “Imagine there is a bubble under your hand,” Mrs. Evans would always say. “And you cannot let the bubble burst.” I kept my hands neatly curved, determined that the little bubble would not die on my watch.

I began to play. It was a slow piece, because clouds are slow, and I was focused intensely – on saving the bubble, on playing the right notes, on pressing my new shoes against the pedal at the right moments, on not thinking about the bazillions of people watching me, on saving the bubble, on playing the right notes, on pressing the pedal, on saving the bubble, on –

CRACK!

My forehead smacked against the top of the piano. My head snapped back as a reflex. I looked up, stunned. In my intent focus, I had leaned too far in and over and hit my head.

I think my fingers kept playing, and I reeled through to the end of the song, trying to process what had happened and all the laughter in the room. I finished the song and stumbled back to my seat. The next kid probably went on stage. I don’t really remember.

When you see the videotape (because, oh yes, there’s footage), it looks so serene – I’m playing, swaying slightly with the music, and then BAM! I’m dazed and confused, and the cameraman is laughing too hard to keep the camera straight.

This week I talked Mom and Dad into letting me take piano lessons.

And they talked me into moving to Taiwan with them (and the boys) in two weeks.

We’re only going to Taiwan for six months, so Mom says I will do theory workbooks until we get back, and I can get a piano then. Mom calls it priming.

Now, I’m no expert, but I’m willing to guess that if you start piano lessons without even touching a piano, your future in that field isn’t going to be as bright as, say, someone who has a piano.

But anyway. We Waynes are nothing if not undeterred, and so we got a load of theory books today, and I am now officially learning piano.

I’m not going to love theory workbooks, I can tell already. I will sit in our little Taiwanese apartment with my pencil and eraser, staring venomously at the pages, drawing faces in all the little notes. Well, the half notes anwyay. The full notes are blacked in. And all the while, Reagan will run around beating pots and pans with wooden spoons. I should have picked drums.

I have a little extra time to blog now as I am in Timeout forever. For pulling a chair out from under Thad. I mean from right under him. In front of probably a million people.

It started with the kindergarten class play, which we were going to perform onstage, in front of all of our parents. I was hoping to play the princess, or even a kangeroo, but no such luck. This play had no confetti, no swords and no animals. In fact, the play was supposed to take place in a classroom. The stage was set up just like our classroom, with our desks and everything moved into place. I felt particularly conned at first, thinking we were going to be onstage doing the same thing we always do when not on stage, but it turned out that we would get to sing and dance a little, too.

My stage desk was directly behind Thad’s. Thad and his family live down the street from us, and he is one of my best friends in kindergarten. We are the fastest readers in the class. Well, last week I was the fastest, but Thad has caught up. I expect to pass him again this week, though. I am pretty sure I don’t like losing.

But I digress. The point is that my stage desk was behind Thad’s, and we took our seats and the performance began. My parents waved at me from the audience, and I waved back. That elicited some soft laughter, and I wasn’t sure if that was good or not. I refocused on the activities on stage.

We began singing and reciting. All was going well. Then Thad stood up to recite his lines.

I don’t know exactly what possessed me. But when he stood up, all of a sudden I remembered a cartoon I saw yesterday. In that cartoon the little boy pulled the chair out from underneath the girl in front of him when she rose. I suppose (because physics is physics) that the girl in the cartoon fell to the ground when she tried to sit down. But I didn’t (and I still don’t) remember that part. I only remember that in the cartoon the boy pulled the chair out.

So Thad stood up and recited his lines.  He was winding down, beginning to sit, and in one swift motion, I swooped in and yanked back his chair. Thad hit the ground with a loud thud. I mean a really loud thud.

Possibly the only person more shocked than Thad was me. I was aghast. Astonished. I had not imagined that would happen. I’m not sure what I thought would happen, but I was truly stunned when Thad hit the floor.

Stunned for a second. And then afraid the Timeout Forever look dawned on my mother’s face.

I now have another brother. That makes two of them.

Perhaps you recall the fiery political canvas upon which Reagan was named. Well, not to be outdone – and certainly not to be left with a one-sided political canvas in the family roster – my father has named my second brother Roosevelt Kennedy Wayne. It is a mouthful, but as it turned out, my father almost named him Franklin Delano Roosevelt Wayne, so there are few complaints.

Perhaps my fascination with the concept of nomenclature is understandable. This week, my first foray into scientific experimentation confirmed the hold the subject has over me.

Roosevelt is now a few months old, and it occurred to my five-year-old mind that babies are not born knowing their own name.

“How will he know his name?” I asked my mother, keeper of essential answers (like where toilet paper goes when you flush it).

I was informed that a baby hears his name so many times that he becomes familiar with the sound of his name, and one day he realizes that it is being used to refer to him.

The English language may not hold a word to describe how absolutely fascinated I was by this knowledge. Charmed. Enthralled. Entranced. (Roget himself is stumped here.) I gazed, mesmerized, at the innocent little thing in the baby-seat: cooing nonchalantly, staring back with those enormous, unsuspecting, saucer eyes.

“So, the more you say his name, that’s how he knows it?” I clarified (my grammar has since improved). I felt it important that I be exactly correct here. My mother assented as much.

I stared again at the unsuspecting infant. Science requires experimentation, I realized. I scampered off. Experimentation requires A Sidekick.

The Lone Ranger had Tonto, Sherlock had Watson, Don Quixote had Sancho Panza, and I have a three-year-old brother. I found him and brought him to see the baby.

“I have an idea,” I told Reagan.

I suppose there are many things that a five-year-old could say that would cause alarm, but as far as things she could say to a compliant, trusting three-year-old brother, I’m pretty sure that “I have an idea” is one of the most ominous.

I explained the way that babies learn their names: by repetition. The more we call him by his name, the sooner he will know it, I summarized. Uneducated Reagan might still be, but stupid he is not. He eyed the innocent by-standing baby with a fascination that mirrored my own. For all practical purposes, this baby was nameless – but only because he had not heard his name uttered enough times.

Not yet, anyway.

The plan was simple: we would take turns (me first, of course) sitting in front of the baby-seat, repeating the baby’s name, hastening his recognition of it. And, since the baby did not know his real name, we could use any name we wanted… tabula rasa indeed.

In a fit of magnanimity, I offered to let Reagan pick the new name. He hesitated, looked around, and then spotting his Tonka truck on the floor, announced “Bulldozer!” with aplomb.

I agreed instantaneously. It seemed like a very fitting name for this small specimen of humanity and quite a funny word, too. Certainly no stranger than the collection of sounds my parents were calling the child. Reagan and I began taking turns repeating “Bulldozer,” confident that the baby would come to think of that as his own name. The plan was fool-proof. It was science.

Fortunately for that innocently by-standing baby, we were five- and three-year-olds, and had the attention span of… well, five- and three-year-olds. So though it seemed like we took turns repeating “Bulldozer” forever, I suspect we stopped after a few minutes.

In any case, Roosevelt answers to an entirely different name now; usually “Felt,” actually, because Roosevelt really is too much.

My parents’ penchant for picking random words and then using them as children’s names has ended. Thank goodness.

I am going to have a brother, and he will not be named for anything edible. No, this time, politics are the hot topic. As dearly as they love words and the sounds of words, so fiercely are my parents devoted to politics. Which might not seem like that big of a deal, except that my mother is a Republican and my father is a Democrat.

My mother is arguing that, technically, my father had chosen my name, and so it is her turn to name the next child. Reagan it is. As in Ronald Reagan, the president. Reagan, my brother Reagan, will get a middle name – Robert – as a consolation prize to my father, but my mother insists on calling him Reagan. “We didn’t give you one name to have you go by another!” she would say. More’s the pity.

The first remarkable thing I have done in my life, not counting birth itself, was to crack my infant head. No small feat for a six-month-old, let me assure you.

On Saturday afternoon, my parents and I went out for a Sunday drive. That may have been the first sign that something horrible was going to happen. My father drove the car – an enormous blue Oldsmobile leftover from the stone age or the 1960s, whichever came first. My mother carried me, snuggly wrapped in a pink fleecy blanket, resting with the utmost ease and comfort in the loving arms of my mother. For a while, all was well; we drove in peace. And then, allegedly, I began to squirm.

I’m willing to concede that, to an untrained eye, it might have seemed like I became inexplicably restless. But in the interest of full disclosure, I feel obligated to inform my readers that, actually, I was completely blameless. If I did begin to wiggle a bit, it was almost undoubtedly because I had a debilitating earache. I am notorious for having earaches, a legend almost. I sleep in a carseat at night, propped upright, to keep the pressure at a minimum. I am living with a kind of disability and subject to no small amount of pain: the doctors knew it, my parents knew it, and at that moment, on that Saturday-afternoon Sunday drive, I knew it.

I had borne most of the drive in good spirits, but at last the pain became too much. That my fit of restlessness should be triggered just at the moment we reached our destination was an occurrence completely out of my hands.

It happened in a flash; I can barely remember the details. I was wiggling, and my mother opened the car door. She put one foot out, to step onto the curb, and I was still wiggling. Wiggling, wiggling, wiggling — and then tumbling out of her arms, down, down, down, my young head smashing onto the curb. And I wailing. At an octave unattainable to even Pavoratti.

I have a bump on my head the size of a softball. It’s practically a second head. I think I will block out the rest of my infancy from memory. It isn’t boding real well.

I’ve been born.

Things seem pretty good here.  There’s an overwhelming amount of pink and lace, but other than that, I think I’m going to like this living business. It’s pretty easy. I eat and sleep when I can; I’m still getting the hang of things, but my parents are always around. It might be tougher if my mom liked to sleep more, but she’s always awake when I am. So we’re good.

I have been blessed with parents who, in addition to loving me dearly, also love words dearly. They especially love the way words sound: the rhythm, the feeling, the sensation, that words make when the sounds cross their lips. The Bilabial Enchantment, one might call it.

Or, in my case, the Fricative-Liquid Curse.

My mother is 8 months pregnant with me, and she and my father have still not chosen my name. They have lists (on little memo pads all over the house); they have a ranking system; and they’ve taken surveys among their friends. But but they claim that nothing has captured their attention dramatically enough.

Tonight, they will go out to their favorite restaurant. It is a little place, the mom-and-pop sort, and the owners know my parents by name. Things at the restaurant will be particularly chaotic tonight. One of the chefs, mom-and-pops’ son, is sick so everyone else will be working double-time; and one of the errand boys, mom-and-pops’ prodigal nephew, is brand-new to the job so he won’t know anything about anything.

“Robert! Dana! So nice we see you!” Pop will cheer as my parents walk in. (Actually, he probably speaks excellent English; I don’t know why I assume he doesn’t.)

My parents will greet Pop back.

“Want to sit at your usual table?” he will ask, and then will interrupt himself with: “Nicky, that doesn’t go there,” shouted to the inept nephew.

My parents will be seated, order their meal, and take some pleasure in surveying the scene around them. Nicky will supposedly be putting groceries and stock away, but he will be doing it so badly that Johnnie will have to hold his hand through the process. Nick (not to be confused with Nicky), the chef who wasn’t sick, will yell at Pop about still not having certain ingredients, and somehow a consensus will be reached (with every party weighing in with his or her opinion at full volume) that Johnnie should put the stock away, Nicky should make another run to the store, Nick should stop being so hard on Nicky, Pop should keep a better order in his restaurant, and the restaurant is Mom’s too.

Nicky will scramble to get out the door as quick as he can – who blames the kid – but as he leaves, Nick will get in one more request, one fateful request: “Don’t forget the celery!”

The room will quiet just as Nick makes his request, and so, uninhibited, the word celery will ring through the restaurant.

“Celery,” my father will repeat.

 And it will happen like this:

“Celery,” my father repeats.

His eyes widen with appreciation. The newly-found silence is shattered as my mother’s fork clatters to the table.

“Celery!” she exclaims.

Their eyes meet, their minds unite.

“We’ll call her Celery!”

“Celery Wayne!”

The music swells; they share a kiss. The restaurateurs shed tears of happiness.

Celery Wayne. There will be no middle name, no OTHER NAME that I could also go by, in the event I grow into a slightly-self-concious six-year-old who might have to stand up one day in front of her entire first grade class and introduce herself.

Celery Wayne. It doesn’t bode well.

“You named me after a stringy, pale green vegetable,” I will end up whining, sobbing, yelling, muttering, or chasting over the years (as the case requires).

“We didn’t think of it like that,” my mother will say, ever-attempting to comfort me. “It wasn’t like we saw a stalk of celery and thought of you. It’s just such a lovely word. It inspired us.”

“In some cultures,” my father will be faithful to inform me, “words are prized more for the way they sound than for their literal definition. Celery is a beautiful word. Say it a few times, you’ll see. See how it feels crossing your lips?”

“In some cultures, first-born daughters were respected. Respected. Not named for vegetables. Considered goddesses!” Obviously I don’t have a lot of evidence to back that up, but what with all the random ancient cultures out there, I have a decent chance at being right.

My dad, more educated than I, will never agree: “Hm. I don’t think so. More often than not, daughters were considered a loss. In one ancient culture, if memory serves me correctly, some daughters were stoned at their infancy. And then consider China with the one-child law. All we did was name you Celery. I think you got off okay.”

And then perhaps he’ll give me a fond smile, because who isn’t grateful that they weren’t stoned at birth?