In looking around for the fancy “-phobia” word signifying a fear of kites, I ran across three things that this entry is not about: an episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” in which Dewey apparently puts to rest his dad’s fear of kites; the title of an episode of what appears to be an anime cartoon entitled “Marsupilami”; and a song by one Selma Booking entitled “A Cloud’s Fear of Kites.” I was unable to find the fancy word I wanted on the Web or in any of my books about strange words. Some “fear” words I did find that are of interest if not particular relevance include the following:

• sophophobia. the fear of learning, which I don’t have
• myrmecophobia. the fear of ants
• maledictaphobia. the fear of bad words
• phalacrophobia. the fear of going bald
• pogonophobia. the fear of beards, which I’m inclined to say I don’t have, as I have a beard, though it may simply be the case that I’m too frightened of it to shave it off
• taphephobia. the fear of being buried alive
• bromidrosiphobia. the fear of body odor, which I keep at bay by using lots and lots and lots of deodorant
• lepidophobia. the fear of butterflies
• nephophobia. the fear of clouds
• hypophobia. the fear of a lack of fear
• arachibutyrophobia. the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
• bathysiderodromophobia. the fear of subways or underground trains

When I mention a fear of kites, I don’t mean that I have a fear of any of the following things listed in the American Heritage Dictionary under the entry for kite:

• Any of the light sails of a ship used in a light wind.
• Any of various predatory birds of the hawk family Accipitridae, having a long, often forked tail and long pointed wings (ok, if I saw one of these up close with its talons going for my eyes, I’d probably be afraid of it, but I’m not generally speaking afraid of these birds).
• A piece of negotiable paper representing a fictitious financial transaction and used temporarily to sustain credit or raise money.
• A bank check drawn on insufficient funds to take advantage of the time interval required for collection
• A bank check altered to show a larger amount
• (Ok, these last three freak me out a bit too, but they’re still not what I’m ultimately talking about.)

It’s the standard definition I’m thinking of: The diamond of paper held rigid by two sticks and followed by a tail of bows; or the standard arrow-shaped kite you can get at your neighborhood drug store in April. Or, in my case, a big multi-colored parrot kite complete with fluttering tail feathers. It is this kite that I flew today, the first time I ever remember successfully flying a kite.

I do remember going out to the practice football field of the high school I lived near when I was a kid and flying kites with my family. On one such outing, I was stung by a bee and found myself treated to a poultice of saliva and tobacco. I was too young to manage a kite during these outings. And I don’t remember ever getting a kite very far up in the sky on later outings when I had my own kite (gray and black like a jet with discongruous eyespots on the wings that in retrospect I imagine would have made such a real jet a pretty easy target).

Today, we were entertaining the almost-four-year-old child of a couple friend who just had another baby. It had been windy last night, and we had the kite (an out-of-the-blue (figuratively speaking, though it could be taken literally) birthday present from a couple of years ago) in the car, so we decided to hit a park today and try to fly it. Mleeka flew it for a few minutes before landing it in a power line. Enter fear number one. I was sufficiently indoctrinated by the power company’s crudely-drawn cartoon commercials when I was a child to know that if you screw with power lines by doing such things as flying kites into them or attempting to get kites out of them, you’re looking for a cooking. This power line was thin and bent at the slightest provocation, so I wasn’t keen on tugging at it with the kite string lest it snap and fall down on me snakelike. So I cut the string. Luckily, the kite fluttered down a few minutes later thanks to a gust, and we retied the string and had another go, this time at a substantially greater distance from the power lines. It was my turn.

And I made a pretty good go of it. I got the kite pretty far up there, getting string burn on my hand as I paid out the line and guided the kite to prevent it from taking nose dives (of which it did several with what would surely have been catastrophic, beak-altering results for a real parrot). Now when I say I got it pretty far up there, I don’t mean that I got it way way up there. It was maybe 100 or 200 feet high, and I hear tell of people who get their kites so high that they’re unrecognizeable dots in the sky. The kite was high for me, but not high by a kite’s standards.

And the higher the kite went, the more apprehensive I became. I wasn’t afraid of kite as object. I wasn’t even afraid so much as increasingly uncomfortable about something I couldn’t and still can’t confidently put a label on.

I’m partially inclined to think my apprehension had to do with a perceived diminution of control: The higher the kite goes, the more influence smaller movements have on it; and the harder it becomes to steer; and the less attached it seems to the string, while at the same time it feels as if it must (or perish the world) stay on that string and in my sight and under my control. But I’m not sure that’s my issue. It may also have partially to do with my long-held notion that the reeling in of a kite is a Sisyphean task, that we tend to be reluctant to bring in the line when there’s a good wind, but as surely as we begin to bring it in, the wind picks up, the result being a kite in flux, never quite high enough and never home but always needing to be reeled in. Essentially, by flying a kite, you’re setting yourself up either to have to reel in a whole bunch of slack line once the string breaks at a point six miles from your spool or to keep up an Old-Man-And-The-Sea scale epic battle with the kite.

I suppose it’s uncertainty that gets my goat. That seems to be the unifying gotcha of both of my primary theories about this little neurosis. The closest thing to this in my phobia book is “kakorrhaphiophobia” — the fear of failure.

When I was a kid, I always wished I had a name like Mark, a good common name that somehow seems to connote tall, dark, and handsome. Not surprisingly, I was short, husky, and freckled. My name was odd, the only instance of it in my small town that I ever heard of. Once in middle school, one of a group of friends who often came over and played basketball after school saw a carton of my parents’ cigarettes (”Doral” brand) and took to calling me Doral afterward, insinuating that my parents had named me after their smokes. That stung a little. I was later (indirectly) avenged, though, as that friend was made sport of at All County band rehearsal: One of the high schoolers, commenting on the friend’s really pretty hot mom, said that if his mom looked like that, he wouldn’t quit breast feeding until he was 20. It turned out that my name also rhymed with barrel and sterile, this last of which stuck. Being called Sterile Daryl (an assault on my, um, manhood rather than a nod to my cleanliness) really bothered me quite a bit, and I was glad to learn recently with the news that Mleeka’s having a baby that I am in fact not sterile. Or that the milkman’s not, maybe. A name that worked me up into an even greater lather was “Fried Dudley.” This moniker was hurled at me by a big red-headed bully in a childhood friend’s neighborhood. I never figured out where the name came from, but this guy (Tony, I think he was yclept) would lumber toward me, contorting his face and calling “Friiiied Duuddddley” in his best gravelly adolescent voice. I complained about this to my mom once, and she taught me the old saying we all know and loathe: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Tony begged to differ, suggesting that if he wrote “Fried Dudley” on a rock and threw it at my face, it’d sure hurt.

When you have a name like mine that’s not staggeringly common, it’s weird to have to say it. Marks and Johns have to say Mark and John all the time because 65% of the people they call by name on a daily basis are Marks and Johns. But there aren’t a great many Daryls, at least in my neck of the woods, so when I find myself having to say my name, it feels weird in my mouth and sometimes comes out sounding weird. There was a skit (I believe a recurring skit) on Kids in the Hall featuring a guy named Daryl, but it was pronounced “dah-RILL” rather than “DARE-ul,” and I’m glad, as that character was a weirdo, more socially inept than I like to admit I may be.

I’ve often tended to think of “Jason” as a very modern name because the kids named Jason tended to be cool or somehow very trendy and by extension cutting-edge and modern. It’s a very old name of either Hebrew origin (meaning “God is my savior”) or Greek origin (meaning “healer”) that has a fairly prominent place in mythology. If I couldn’t have been a Mark, I wouldn’t have minded terribly being a Jason.

My daughter’s name is going to be Lennon. That’s my middle name, after my grandfather who died when I was very young. My parents were fundamentally opposed to naming kids after family members because doing so stands to hurt the feelings of those whose names aren’t picked. But when I was on the way, my grandfather was very sick, and I believe the story goes that they hoped giving me his middle name would make him feel good. I don’t know that they thought it would heal him or anything (maybe if I were named Jason in the Greek tradition), but they thought he’d dig it. I’ve always liked my middle name. Sadly, none of my originally given names (more on that in a minute) can be pronounced without some joker piping up: “Daryl” (”Where’s your other brother?”) “Lennon” (”So’re you a communist?” [I don't spell it for people until after they make this crack]) “Houston” (”Houston, we have a problem.”) All in all, I’m pretty happy with my whole given name, though; three good strong trochees are hard to beat.

Of course, shortly before I got married, I screwed that all up by infixing Mleeka’s name between my middle and last names. What I lost in trochees, I got back in spades in initials, though. It’s my two middle initials (or one middle and one of two lasts — complicated, huh?) that prompted me to call this blog “Two Ells.” I dig having two ells. I’m like J.R.R. Tolkien: D.L.L. Houston. The only real downside is that I get LL Cool Jay jokes, but those are pretty rare. But back to the reason I fiddled with my name. Mleeka felt kind of weird about changing hers. And not unreasonably so. She spent the first twenty-some years of her life with one name, and all of a sudden, just because we’re signing a document saying we’re officially recognized by the state as a couple, she has to go and change her whole name? Your name is your identity. Without it, people would have a hard time getting your attention in a crowd. I don’t blame anybody for feeling weird about making a change like that. It’s a bigger deal (if a less painful one) than chopping off your little toe or having your appendix removed. She tried to browbeat me into changing my name, or at least adding hers to mine, and I feigned disgust at the idea. Honestly, it did strike me as a little odd, emasculating in a way, as it’s a known fact that it’s the woman who changes her name. But I went through with it in secret and delivered the name-change documents to her for the holidays one year. I didn’t want to drop Lennon, though, so I just kept four names. Part of what’s cool about our having the same blended last names is that our kid can share our name without either of us having to drop our own. (As I live in Tennessee, I might have gotten around this problem altogether by simply marrying my sister, but alas, she was already spoken for by the time I came of age and means for marrying.) And not having a different name from our kids was the main thing keeping Mleeka from changing hers.

So I was pretty stoked when Mleeka proposed Lennon as the name for our little girl. Called Lennon Learn Houston, her name would be a subset of mine. Now I’m not all hung up on carrying on names and having things or people named after me (I could have cared less whether Mleeka changed her name to mine, for example), but it’s just cool to have a kid whose name is exactly three-quarters of your own. It’s not narcissism so much as a fascination as with little nesting dolls that turned me on to the idea of this name. But this nifty Vinn diagram of names wasn’t to be ultimately: Mleeka wanted to commemorate her treasured grandmother in the name of what will most likely be our only child, so she’ll be Lennon Louise Learn Houston. As she’s the one squeezing the baby out and all, I suppose Mleeka can claim a right to have the major role in naming our child. And while I’m not fond of the name Louise, I do think it’s cool that she’ll have not two, but three, ells and four initials, like her Pop.

Oh, and I almost forgot:

Daryl Daryl bo baryl
banana fanna fo faryl
fee fie mo maryl, Daryl

It’s my 27th birthday. I like the number 27: Two primes, the product of a square and its root (3 and 9). I don’t especially like the age 27, though. You might consider it just over the hill of youth (unless you’re Bush, for whom youth reached well into his 30s), but it’s also just under the milestone of 30, which is what I’m really sort of stretching for. The average age of my friends is probably 40 or 45, and I’m one of the rosy-cheeked babies. I feel guilty at times when my friends have cause to reflect on my age; maybe they feel weird for having such a young friend, like a guy my age dating a high school girl (except that such a guy apparently doesn’t feel so bad about it). 28 will be better, I think. At 27, I’m still firmly entrenched in the 20s, but at 28, I’ll be mounting the springboard into the 30s.

Some people who share my birthday include the following:

• Laura Dern
• George Stephanopoulos
• Greg Norman
• Robert Wagner
• Lon Chaney Jr.
• Bertolt Brecht
• Jimmy Durante

None of these people excite me a great deal. I doubt I excite them either.

Once at a summer program I attended, I met a guy who not only had the same birthday as me but also had the same name spelled the same way (not all that common). We were pretty much opposites in terms of personality, though. He was outgoing and rambunctious, while I was shy and reserved. I always rather liked sharing a name with the movie about a kid robot who saved the world. His name was an acronym for Data Analyzing Robot Youth Lifeform. Pretty vapid from a technical point of view, but I sure dug it when I was 9.

I believe I’ll be the same age when my pending child is born as my dad was when his first child (my sister) was born.

Birthdays are always a little disappointing to me nowadays. Holidays in general are, probably because holidays tend to focus on kids. Compared to the incomparable excitement I felt in anticipation of birthdays and other holidays as a kid, these celebrations stand out less vibrantly now that I’m all grown up. It’s not so much the presents and the to-do I miss (as I sometimes find these things awkward to accept) as it is the fact of the excitement. As my child grows up, I imagine some of this excitement will return and that I’ll be able to experience it vicariously through her.

I’ve learned about the deaths of two friends recently. One was of a friend I hadn’t been in touch with for years. The other was a friend I had recently visited with.

Let’s start with Jim Standish, the unintentionally estranged friend. I met him on the Internet while in college. I posted a question about poetry to a newsgroup dedicated to the topic, and he sent me sort of an ornery response, figuring I was either a troll or a person who wanted easy answers without any hard work. And he was justified generally speaking, as such characters were in abundance. I replied to him intelligently and courteously and a friendship was born. For several years while I was in college and for a year or so afterward, we maintained a vaguely literary correspondence that I think benefitted both of us. He was a good guy, gentle and humanitarian. We dropped the correspondence gradually as, thrust into the real world from out of academia, I had less time for literary endeavors and we had less immediately in common. I looked Jim up on the Web a couple of months ago and learned that he had died, I believe of cancer. He was in the neighborhood of 70 at the time. A high school acquaintance aside, he was the first person I had a real attachment to who died. Jim had sent me several of his self-published books of poetry over the years, and I got them all out and picked through them again, remembering fondly how jolly he was and sadly what a void his absence must have left for those who knew him well.

The other friend was Fred Venditti, also in his seventies. Fred I knew in person. Old as he was getting, he could still hike a trail in the Smoky Mountains and lead a raucous discussion about one of his favorite topics of group discussion, educational philosophy. You couldn’t help but think of a Norman Rockwell-style painting when you saw Fred, with his swept-back glossy white hair and his grandfatherly look. Neither my wife nor I knew our grandfathers very well, and though Fred was no surrogate (we were beyond the point of intense grandfather adulation when we met him, I think), we did in a way look up to him as a benevolent and respected grandfatherly figure. But there was more to it than that. Nearly three times my age, he took me seriously and took a real interest in me as a person, as an equal. One of our first long exchanges was at a camping trip we attend annually in Alabama. I was a relatively new member of the circle of friends that introduced me to Fred, and he was eager to learn more about me. He perked up when he learned that I had studied literature and writing in college. He too was interested in writing, had a book in the works, and had several memoirs in a drawer. He proposed that we occasionally exchange work to critique, but we never managed it. Fred wound up in the last few months being diagnosed with brain cancer. He had taken a fall, and his wife got home shortly thereafter and found him lying on the ground immobile. He confessed afterward that he had been afraid he had been displaying symptoms of Parkinsons, but the doctor visit after the fall produced the more immediately damaging diagnosis. We visited him a couple of times during the last months of his life. He was always his typical gregarious, debonair self. Paralyzed down one side of his entire body, he would sit and entertain friends, spreading about his usual witty banter, his eyes twinkling. He asked me once during a visit how my writing had been coming. I had forgotten about our exchange a couple of years ago and was surprised and pleased that he remembered it. His novel was finally going to press, he told me. Fred’s hanging onto this little detail about a long-ago conversation is what I think best characterizes him: He was a person who bothered to remember the things important to others however incidental they were to his own life. He lost that life about two weeks ago amid his family. I sure hate that he’s gone, though I’m glad his suffering (and his family’s) was short and that he went out peacefully and surrounded by the people his gracious life had attracted to him.