Yonge Sonne

Tristram Shandy's father had a theory of names, regarding one's offspring, which for me boiled down to the idea that it's good to have a good name, and bad to have a bad one. Before our first was born, we had several conversations on this topic.

If it were up to me-

It is up to you-

Well then, if it were up to me, and we have a boy, I would name him after Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand?

No, Russell.

I thought Russell was a fine name, and still do. Betty agreed, so we went with that. And it was a boy. But Betty trumped my effort at naming with her choice of an epithet, as she was being wheeled out of the delivery room, still a little giddy from the ordeal. As I took her hand, she managed a sleepy smile and whispered, "He's a yonge sonne."

I didn't get it. Later, she reminded me of Senior English when we had to learn the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales and recite them in the original Middle English...

...Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye....

And so it stuck, as one of the several names by which we refer to Russell. But, since Middle English is not well understood, these days, I prefer the American rendition: I call him Son.

Anyway, he grew up and was a good boy. When he was about six years old, we discovered that, through some strange chance, he had been born an engineer. We had given him a train set for Christmas, complete with transformer, tracks and smoke tablets, and later we found that he had taken the transformer apart and rewired it, for some purpose of his own.



Then, when he was twelve, he came home from school one day with a book he had found in the library. It was a technical manual, describing all the inputs and outputs of the pins on the 8080 Central Processing Unit. He read it every day and soon knew it by heart. We took him to the doctor to see if anything could be done, but the doctor said, rejoice, he's wired for double-E.

So we sent him to Georgia Tech to get the education he needed for that. And soon he was waiting for offers of work to come in. But, for a week or so, after graduation, there weren't any.

He said, "I'm a loser."

But then, the next day, IBM called with a career in designing computer chips, which was just what he wanted to do. It all worked out.

But he wasn't through: he married one of those Nashville Portnoy girls. They have two boys, Matthew and Jared, 12 and 8, both born engineers. Lynn had a difficult delivery with the first and was worn out and recuperating the first few weeks. Russell took over the task of dealing with child and household at the same time and managed them both handily, to our amazement. He bathed, dressed, and fed baby, and changed dirty diapers 24 hours a day. He washed dishes with one hand, while holding the baby in his other arm like a little football. We couldn't believe it. There's nothing in the engineer's manual about dealing with delicate little creatures. Or maybe there is: when I complimented him on his parenting skills, he shrugged it off with an observation. He said, "Even computer chips need a lot of care."