Steamed by Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant Page B

as scintillating as his welcome letter had been. The head of the library tried to present a virtual tour of the library’s many state-of-the-art features, but her computer kept freezing, and we were left to gaze at a close-up of the book-drop slot.
     
    At noon we broke up for lunch and were presumably expected to mingle and discuss our life’s dreams of saving the oppressed. As I hid in a corner, I looked around and noticed that everyone else was much more dressed up than I was; the others were treating this event as a foray into the professional world of suits and ties. Earnest students were gathered in groups, probably to share their hopes for the year’s academic pursuits. I felt so much like a wallflower at a high school dance that I wished I’d brought along a flask of peppermint schnapps—in high school, at least, it would’ve made me the most popular kid there.
     
    We’d been handed massive notebooks full of graduate school information. Mine included my schedule of classes, which ran Wednesday through Friday, and the contact information for my “field placement,” social work speak for internship . I’d forgotten about that. Monday and Tuesday were designated “field placement” days on which we were thrown into the trenches and expected to put into use the skills we were learning in the classroom. I’d been given a placement at the Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace and was to call Naomi Campbell (I swear that was her name) before Monday. Why was everything social work related required to have the longest possible title? And it was in downtown Boston, which probably meant I’d have to take the T, since parking downtown was either impossible or too expensive to do on a regular basis.
     
    I spent the hour from one to two seated with three other students in my advisor’s office. His name was Dick Dickers, and I passed that hour wondering what kind of parents do that to a kid. So his name was probably Richard, and Rick Dickers wasn’t much better than Dick Dickers, but with a last name like that, the kind thing to do would have been to avoid anything that sounded remotely like Dickers. There were millions of names out there for parents to choose from: James Dickers, Adam Dickers, William Dickers . . . although Willy Dickers would probably have sent gradeschoolers into whoops of laughter. I was sure he’d been called Dicky Dickers by children throughout the public school system. Parents should name their children responsibly. Like, if my parents had had a son, they clearly couldn’t have named him James, a choice that would have resulted in a baby Jimmy Carter crawling around. But poor Dick Dickers had been doomed to a life of students being too distracted by his name to hear any of the important information he had to impart regarding his availability as an advisor to overworked social workers. As I was leaning against the back of the hard wooden chair in Mr. Dickers’s office and not listening to what he was saying, it occurred to me that when it came to naming babies, the parents of the United States had collectively lost their minds and didn’t want to find them. In particular, no one wanted advice on what to name a child, as my sister Heather could attest. When she was pregnant with her first child, her friend Ruth had rejected every name Heather had come up with because it had reminded her of some celebrity. Donald had made Ruth think of Donald Trump, Theodore had led to Ted Kaczynski, and she’d even gone from Jennifer to Gennifer Flowers. When Heather and Ben had finally decided on the name Walker, Ruth had immediately said, “Oh, like Walker, Texas Ranger ?” Heather had been totally fed up by then and had shouted back angrily, “Yes, EXACTLY like Walker, Texas Ranger !” Ruth was not consulted or informed about baby number two’s name until after the birth certificate had been signed.
     
    I made a minor attempt to focus on Mr. Dickers until