Posted by:
Nile H.
(
)
Date: November 08, 2010 09:21AM
NormaRae is better today (Sunday). She was glad for the well-wishing she got, from them that wished her well, at least. Her son and people from her church are helping. Believe it or not, she's only gone to the ER, and her arm has not been set yet. One hopes they will do that Monday. I'll let her fill you in, if she can ever succeed in typing a letter with her right arm cinched to her side.
I guess a certain SOMEone didn't like my name when I posted the other day to inform people that NormaRae had had a serious accident. I was lurking, as I sometimes do, but wanted people to know what happened to NormaRae. The thread was eventually removed because an individual protested my name. It's always somewhat hurtful when someone is offended at your name, but there's always a story. My grandfather, Aloysius Graf von Hohde und Sache, was a minor aristocrat (a "graf," or count) from an obscure valley in the Erz Mountains in Thuringia. He fell into difficulty in Weimar Germany during Hitler's rise to power because the family of his genteel wife, Charlotte (nee Holzafter) had Jewish connections. He left Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to the States with his family, eventually settling in Red Wing, Minnesota. The US immigration authorities were not happy with his long name, and insisted he change it. They were also completely unimpressed by his station in life. When they handed his paper back to him, the last name had been unceremoniously changed to simply "Hodensack." This was unfortunate, of course, but what can you do?*
My father, although born in Germany and next in line for the "grafschaft" (literally a "county," although the term is no longer used), never spoke the mother tongue beyond eight years or so of age, and became totally American. Trying to cling to a bit of his German heritage, however, he named me after an uncle Philemon, and I became Philemon Nile Hodensack. (Actually, he named me "Neil" but called me "Nile," possibly having some confusion between English and German spellings of an English name. People began to call me Neil as in "Neal," so we had to have it legally changed to reflect the true pronunciation.) Anyone who dares call me "Philemon" is in for a fight, and I'm not to be trifled with. (I'm a grand-hatter in the Scottish/Northern English martial art of Ecky Thump--"icky thump" in the US--and I always have at least one black pudding concealed about my person in case of a fight.) So I go by Nile. Of course my parents, converts to Mormonism, hoped big things for me, like bishop, stake president, mission president, perhaps even general authority. My mom would insist on using my initials with my given name, just like the GA's and mission presidents, and would sometimes blurt out, "He to whom you have just listened was P. Nile Hodensack of the Seventy."
Proudly,
Nile H.
No Longer a Poster
*I'm sorry to have alarmed people with my moniker. It could have been so much worse. Loosely related family that emigrated from Germany during the same difficult years were named the northern German equivalent of "Fuchs" ("Fox"), that has the unfortunate regional spelling using a K in place of the H. This didn't fly well with US immigration, so they insisted their new name be "Ficks," which is just fine, except that the new American family would never (ever) be able to return to Germany, since "Ficks" in German means what "Fuc*s" means in English.
When I was in the military we had a Captain Charlie Dimschitz, which is an equally unfortunate name. But did we make fun of him? Yes, but not to his face, what with him being a commissioned officer.