When I was in my early teens I lived in a small logging community. Most of the families had been there generations so knowing someone's last name meant you knew the person's family, probably generations of the person's family. And there was a family there named Adams and there were a lot of girls in that family. So, when I got there, people would say, Are you one of Blackie Adams' girls? And you could see they were puzzled because they thought they knew all Blackie Adams' girls but hey, Blackie had quite a few girls maybe there was an extra who had just escaped notice. Over time, the distinction grew up, there were Blackie Adams' girls, and there was That Adams Girl. It was the community's way of naming me so I fit into the grand scheme of things. Most people from the community were someone's child. Like Blackie Adams' girls were. I was a waif without community identifiable familial ties so the community gave me a name all my own.
That community was real good to me. It gave me a name. And a sense of place and belonging I had not encountered before because we moved so much when I was a kid. And the people there treated me like one of their own when I was real different from anything anybody there had ever seen before. I was used to being different. I was not used to belonging. I kept the name.
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