Sandy Day. People often ask, “Is that your real name?” Which kind of baffles me because it’s not that weird, is it?

It’s not like I’m from Saudi Arabia and covered in sand or something. Though I have resided near a beach for my entire life. But my name’s not Sunny Day, or Wendy Day, or Summer Day. Those would be silly.

Do you know the story of your name? Apparently, everyone has one—a story, I mean—and a name come to think of it.

Okay, enough preamble—this is the story of my name. I was the fourth and final child for my parents, and my mom decided that whether I was a boy or a girl, I was going to be named Sandy.

Perhaps she was influenced by the popularity of Sandra Dee the movie star because there were a helluva lot of Sandy D’s in my classes throughout grade school. Yet Mom denies that. She says it was after her sister Sandra, and her dad’s nickname Sandy (he was a Sanders), and Dad had a brother Sandy too whose last name, of course, was Day.

Uncle Sandy caused, and continues to cause, occasional troubles on Facebook because he and I were “friends” before he died, and people with both of us in their friend lists sometimes mix us up. I get tagged on Uncle Sandy’s various anniversaries, and sometimes it’s awkward to un-tag myself.

Again, I’ve digressed, darn it.

So, I was thusly named Sandra. And the intention was always to shorten it to Sandy. Nowadays, they would just call the baby Sandy and to hell with formalities, but this was the sixties, you know, back when the Beatles hit the airwaves, and people still followed rules. Shake it up, baby.

When I was around six, my mom read to me Now We Are Six, and it was then that she filled me in on the story of my name. In that book is a poem called “Forgiven” and in the poem is a beetle (who I mixed up with The Beatles, naturally) and the Beetle’s name is Alexander Beetle.

So, I asked if I had been a boy named Alexander (to be shortened to Sandy) what would my middle name have been?

I swear to God, she answered, Beetle.

I was tickled pink!

Imagine hearing the teacher call roll and my name would be Alexander Beetle Day.

I loved the idea, and kinda wished I’d had the opportunity to have such a prestigious and preposterous moniker.

I’ve repeated this story approximately a thousand times in my lifetime.

So, when I was thinking about writing this post, I got to wondering. Would Mom really have given me the middle name Beetle. I mean, really?

It was the sixties and she couldn’t even bring herself to just put Sandy on the birth certificate form.

I decided to ask, to verify, and that’s when I realized that my mom was in the hospital—suffering from an infection that had caused congestive heart failure and delirium—and she was fairly non-responsive, if not nonsensical.

Yikes.

Real talk here. One day, my mom is going to die, and then when I need to verify stuff for these little stories—she’s going to be gone.

But the good news for now is she’s back home and thanks to modern medicine she’s doing much better.

I raced down to her room to ask her about Alexander Beetle.

She remembered, of course, she has an elephant’s memory for poetry and lyrics and the names of kids in her grade one class of 1937—she remembered the poem.

I told her that when I was little, she told me that had I been a boy my name was going to be—

She interrupted, “Alexander. And we’d call you Sandy.”

“Yeah, I know, but you also said that my middle name would be Beetle.”

“I didn’t,” she scoffed.

“You did!”

She laughed.

She laughed! She was kidding me way back then and that’s why they call it kidding, isn’t it? Because I was a kid, gullible, innocent, and I’ve been spreading this misinformation around for about half a century.

A few weeks ago, I was applying for the Canadian Dental Plan, which is now available to all eligible Canadians. I filled in the online form and expected I would hear from them in a few weeks. Maybe. I kept my reference number because I was pretty sure I’d have to be calling them back to check on my status.

To my surprise, I received a phone call from them the next day. (I answer blocked and unlisted phone numbers now because it could be a health care provider calling about my mom.) The kind woman on the other end of the phone said she needed to verify something because there was a problem with my social insurance number.

I have my S.I.N. memorized so I rarely take the card out of its secret spot in my dresser, identity theft, and all that.

I thought, uh oh, did I put in the wrong number?

But no. She asked, “Can you confirm the name on your social insurance card?”

Ohhhh, now I knew the trouble.

I had applied for the dental insurance with my real real name, Sandra. The name under which I file taxes, have a passport, and a driver’s license.

“The name on the card is Sandy Day,” I told her. “I applied for it when I was in grade two. The whole class had to fill in the forms—we were seven.”

Believe it or not she said, “I hear that a lot.”

Oh my God. Anyway, since then, I haven’t heard a peep.

So that’s the story of my name: a seven-year-old’s handwriting on a government form, a sixty-year-old lie about a beetle, and somewhere in a filing cabinet, proof that I’ve been Sandy Day all along. At least I got to ask Mom about Alexander Beetle while she’s still here to say to me, joke’s on you—even if I can’t ask her which version of my name the dental plan card will come with.

I write these essays in the early morning quiet, trying to catch something true before it slips away. If this one landed for you, a tip in the jar tells me to keep going.

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