I'm the oldest of five kids, and have two brothers and two sisters. I was officially named Rick right on my birth certificate. They figured I would be called Rick instead of Richard anyway, so why bother naming me with a longer, fancy name nobody would ever use? Because of it, I've been asked my whole life, "Is it Richard?" when someone was looking my name up or inputting it into something. I had one idiot teacher actually turn and look at me and ask, "Are you sure?" (No, dumbass, let me call my mommie and check!) My dad said I was named after a guy in a Hot Rod magazine (he even showed it to me once--the guy really did have my whole name), but I'm pretty sure he (or they) chose my name because all the initials were the same as my dad's were.
Don was born just a year and a half after I was, at the hospital in Cape Fear, North Carolina. For some odd reason he was named after dad's dad. What's odd about that fact was that my dad did not like his father, so why my new brother was named after Grandpa Don is beyond me. Maybe that had something to do with Don never seeming to get much respect from my dad while we were growing up. As long as I can remember Don has always been subjected to a kind of "second class" treatment. His nickname for Don when we were little was "fat bastard." He seemed to think that was a pretty witty nickname. He called him that all the time when he was in a good mood, thinking it was apparently pretty funny. I didn't get it--calling a son that was just as thin as the rest of us in the family were--"fat bastard". We were all slim.
Jackie was born number three, and was born at the Army hospital at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Like me, she was named with the slang version of her name right on her birth certificate. If she were named Jacqueline she would have just been called Jackie, right? I remember Jackie as always being a free-spirited girl that was always trying imaginative clothing combinations. She has always had an exceptional amount of creativity when it comes to unique styles and decorations.
After Jackie came Denis. He was named after our dad, and again--I don't know why. Dad's first name is Robert, and he hated his name (or so I had heard on more than one occasion). So what does he do? He goes and names his kid the same as he. To reinforce the notion that he doesn't like his first name, they chose to call him by his middle name, Denis, instead. Weird. Denis was always the "ham" in the family. When a camera came out, there was Denis. He became adept at performing for people for laughs as he grew up. He was our family comedian, though his style was mainly of slapstick and one-liner humor (my style is more the deeper, cynical, dry humor variety).
Denise is the youngest. She came along almost three years after Denis arrived. I don't know if she was an accident or not, but I'd like to think she was not. I'd like to think that they were giving it one last try for another girl to even out the sexes in their brood, even if they ran the risk of upsetting it even further should another boy have come along. Denise was instantly dad's favorite--but in retrospect I got the impression she was more like his pet. I think he was always at his best with little kids because he didn't know how to relate to anyone old enough to actually have a conversation with him. As we kids got older, rules and restrictions slowly eased or fell away completely. By the time Denise came along she didn't even have a bedtime.
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