What's In A Name ?

Everybody has a name; and luck of the draw being what it is I ended up with a funny sounding… I mean unique one. I have one of those names that some folks would call distinctive, which is another way of saying that it’s a not very common. As a youngster my mom would tell me that I had a distinguished name whenever I came home from school upset because my classmates would tease me about my name. ‘PillowTalk’ is the name that they used to callme and then they’d all laugh at me. I would sometimes have to hold back the tears. Over the years I have learned to accept and take pride in my name and in the process I have gained a lot more than I bargained for. This is a true story…partially.
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I was born in the sixties and I consider myself to be an ‘Old-Schooler,’but I’m not the type that’s adverse to modern technology. I’m actually pretty handy on a computer; in fact I’ve recently given in to the Social Network trend and created my very own
Facebook page.When used appropriately I’ve found it to be quite an effective tool for helping to connect people to one another. Well one day while I was online I happened
upon a complete stranger that had the same last name as mine. This was eye-opening for a guy with a name like mine. I decided to keep searching and in a very short while
I discovered at least a hundred people(black, white, Hispanic and Asian), from almost every state and some from overseas who also shared my very uncommon moniker. Since none of these people were at any of the family reunions that
I’d attended, I couldn’t imagine how they happened to have my name. Curious George that I am, I couldn’t just let it go. I got the bright idea that we must all share
some ancient common ancestor and that if we searched hard enough we could find him or her. So I sent out messages and rallied these new found troops on a mission to gather
and exchange histories in the hopes of finding the original Pillow Talker.
People set to task and even though we collected an impressive
amount of data, none of these very interesting lineages seemed destined to intersect. In time after expending an exhaustive amount of collective effort we found ourselves
becoming more and more discouraged. This was when I experienced an incredible breakthrough. Suddenly everything made perfect
sense and things just fell right into place. In the course of playing genealogical connect the dots I came to the realization that if we just searched long enough and went back far enough we would come face to face with our common ancestors.We would also find our common father: The Original Pillow-Talker dwelling in His paradise
called heaven. What began as a quest to find out the truth about my own personal history led me to a greater truth,a larger common denominator that we
all share; the fact that we are all members of the flesh and blood human race.What I had discovered is that family names are a wonderful thing, but they should not
become a distraction from the fact that we are all brothers and sisters of the same ultimate family tree. Somehow we have fallen into the belief that because a person isn’t from the same racial group or country as we are fromthat they are not
a part of our family. Regardless of their cultural or ethnic heritage, sexual
orientation, and religious beliefs most people have the same exact goals in life; to live, to laugh and to love.We all share the same planet and have a common Father/Creator no matter what one chooses to call Him. We all want the best for our
children.We all want to love and be loved. Just like any normal family, we have our differences and disagreements from time to time but if we kept in mind that we are family maybe we would be more willing to work things out peacefully. So if there is a moral to this story I guess it would have to be that maybe we should love our neighbor
as though they were members of our very own family, because if you really think about it they’re actually your distant cousins in a family of beautifully different human beings under a common Father:
The Original Pillow-Talker.