Dad's advice: "Forget it, pal. Teasing's part of every schoolkid's routine."
"Just remember how it feels," suggested Mom, "if you're ever tempted to tease somebody about their name or appearance or whatever."
"Your first and last names both are names to be proud of, son."
Mock-indignant Maddy then, "Not the middle?"
"Middle too!" her husband amended, and patted his wife's near knee. "For sure!"
"Did Grandpa get called Phil-up and stuff?"
Speaking to his son's image in the rearview mirror, "Not that he ever mentioned."
And Madeline, with a knowing small smile at her spouse, "Grandpa Phil was never one for mentioning things."
Their son then and there decided "I hate my name!"
"No!"
"I hate my name, too," offered four-year-old Marsha, who until that moment had never thought about her name.
"No you don't." Mom. "It's a lovely name."
"Is not." But in fact, like most people, she had no particular feelings about her name — her first name, anyhow — but simply accepted it as hers. As for Blank, while Marsha would be spared the degree of schoolmate teasing about it that her brother was subjected to, she wasn't sorry to abbreviate it to a middle initial nineteen Septembers later, upon her marriage.
Young Phil, however — although by second and third grade his classmates' jibes had become mere idle reflex — found himself unable to shrug off the twinge of dissatisfaction he felt at every roll call, every form that required him to fill its Name-blank with his Blank name. Neither popular with nor disliked by his fellows, he did his best not only to blend in but to… not disappear, quite, but to draw as little attention as possible to himself and thus to his awkward name, which by fifth grade he was determined to change as soon as he became "his own man": perhaps when he left home for college? Even before then, when pupils from the area's several neighborhood and township elementary schools came together in Centre County Junior High and High School, he experimented with P. Norman Blank and Norman P. Blank—"Norm for short," he informed his classmates, entreated his parents, and threatened his sister. But while his new teachers and classmates readily obliged, and his family did their best, most of his old classmates either forgot or declined to use his new name, and a few explained the old tease to their new comrades. The unhappy result was more rather than less attention to the tender subject; by the spring of his freshman high school year he was, for the most part, back to being called Phil Blank.
"Whoever that might be," he said to himself in effect, if not necessarily in those words; for as the CCHS class of '71's hormones kicked in and cranked up the ambient sexual voltage, and numerous of his schoolmates took their behavioral cues from the still-modest contingent of long-haired dope-smoking war-protesting hippie undergraduates over at the university (as the college became in the 1960s), Phil/ Norm found it ever more difficult to decide who exactly he was, and to dress and behave accordingly. What he felt, but couldn't quite articulate even to himself, was that while one's name is not one's self (any more than one's life story is one's life), his peculiar name was a major determinant of his identity — whatever that might be. Its implicit directive—Fill blank! — led to both hyper-self-consciousness and abnormal self-uncertainty. The selves of his classmates seemed to him bone-deep and plain as day: Billy Marshall the taunting, newly hippie pothead and wannabe rock musician; Elsa Bauer the shy but not un-self-confident, really cute, and almost friendly sophomore class secretary, etc. His own self, on the contrary, seemed to him improvised, tentative, faint, and fluid: a masquerade. An act.
"Now, don't you worry," his mother worried when, in a moment of what had become unusual closeness between her son and anyone, he attempted to confide to her some of the above. "It's just a stage you're going through, honeybun. We all go through stages at your… you know…"
"My stage?"
And not long after, "Now, don't you worry, son," his dad embarrassed him by advising, which meant that Mom had blabbed the whole thing. "One of these days you're going to be somebody. That'll show 'em!"
"Yeah, right."
Kid sister Marsha — who in most respects seemed both to herself and to Philip to be the elder sibling — rolled her self-possessed eyes, but refrained from comment.
As if prompted by the conjunction of an act, a stage, and be somebody, in his latter high school years the young man found himself drawn to theater in general and the school's Drama Club in particular. Alas, although he tried out for a number of productions, it was apparent early on, to him and to the drama coach, that he had no notable thespian gift (compared, say, to Elsa Bauer, whose shyness miraculously vanished when she played another). He managed a few member-of-the-chorus roles — which, on reflection, he found more to his taste anyhow than being one of the play's principals. Even more he enjoyed sitting in the audience in a darkened hall and losing, in some film or stage play, the self that he'd never quite found.
He was, like the rest of his household, an indifferent secular agnostic who gave next to no thought to that noun or its modifiers. The Blanks celebrated Christmas, but observed no Sabbath, prayed no prayers, belonged to no church, and seldom spoke of religion. Son Philip, from age fourteen on, masturbated with about the same frequency as his male classmates, but had no way of knowing that. Managed a few dates in his junior and senior years — one with Elsa Bauer, who permitted him a ceremonial goodnight kiss but was already bespoken (by Billy Marshall) for the senior prom. Attended that function with Betsy Whitmore instead, a pleasant though plump and plain classmate of Marsha, who arranged the date. Neither partner much cared for dancing, but dance they duly did, a bit. Afterward, in the second seat of Billy's parents' two-tone green '69 Pontiac four-door, for appearances' sake they shared a reefer of marijuana and went through the motions of making out (he was permitted to squeeze his date's ample breast, under her blouse but not under her bra, and even briefly, with his other hand, to cup her crotch, under her skirt but not under her pantyhose—"And not a whit more," she seriously joked), to the distracting accompaniment of more vigorous grunts, moans, sighs, and thrashings in the vehicle's front seat. Betsy presently remembered a 1 A.M. parental curfew not previously mentioned; her date "called it an evening" too, forgoing the ritual sunrise breakfast at the class president's house after the all-night party at So-and-So's folks', out past the university's experimental farms.
"Talk about filling in the blanks!" Billy Marshall boasted next day re his and Elsa's front-seat shenanigans. Four years later, like several other high school classmate-sweethearts who elected to stay on at the local university instead of "going off" to college, that couple married, found suitable employment in the area, and raised their own brood in Happy Valley. Betsy Whitmore, however — with whom Phil more or less enjoyed one further date during the summer after his graduation — moved to Michigan with her family soon after, and the young pair did not maintain contact.
Philip himself, having done editorial and layout work on the staff of his high school newspaper, summer-jobbed as an intern with the county's Centre Daily Times and, without seriously considering alternatives, matriculated at "State" in September. His father had suggested a major in Business Administration as most likely to help a fellow without particular ambitions at least to earn a decent living, but did not protest his son's choice of General Arts and Sciences instead: "It's your life, not mine." His mother mildly approved: "Keeps your options open till you find yourself, you know?" Marsha rolled her eyes. Brother and sister were not at all close, but neither was there sibling rivalry or other ill will between them: Their relation was prevailingly cordial and passively affectionate, if somewhat stiff on Philip's part. She was not unhappy when after his freshman year he moved out of the house into the college dorms; but she defended, against her parents' complaints, his junior-year decision to change his name to Philip B. Norman. "Relax," she advised them. "At least he decided something."