"On Words and Names," short meditations by Lois Greene Stone

Words.  Always filling my mind just waiting for the chance to be written out.  How could Philip Roth declare he’d run out of words!  And he stopped writing!  Here I sit with the font enlarged facing my desktop computer’s blank screen, just smiling for a second, knowing words in my head will exit my fingers and fill the allotted margins.

I just signed a contract for two completed novels to be published by a book company.  Okay?  Nice? I’d turned down such a deal years ago when a Contract Lawyer read the document and told me it favored the publisher.  But time continued to change calendar years and now, in my 90's, it is truly ‘running out’.  So, on May 20, 2026, I accepted.  

Foolish?  In a way, as it will be at least a year for the publisher to take my pages of typed copy and format them for books, design a cover, market, and so forth.  And I certainly have little chance to be depositing royalty checks in a bank account.  So, isn’t this an absurd thing to do now when I had the chance before and I would have been able to see these two novels and say ‘mine’ and speak of them with family members, do readings and signings?  Unlike Roth, I still have words, and, as a writer, am compelled to use them.  No, I won’t see my novels bound and for sale, and my younger son will receive my royalty checks, but sitting here with failing eyesight, and a body that reminds me it, too, is failing, hasn’t affected the need to compose.  Roth was 85 when he died ‘quietly’; unless he had an illness that affected his brain, how could he not write until death claimed him!

I had to stop playing the piano for medical reasons but writing is not the act of looking at a score and having the eyes tell the fingers which keys to depress while the ears enjoy the sound.  I can’t walk without holding a walker, and other old-age maladies.  But as long as there are words and I am able to see enough to write them out, I’m a writer!  While I won’t know if my novels are successful or not commercially, they will be published and available and might just affect someone’s emotions.  I’m alive; I like that idea.  

Note: The novels, Bells and Blades, are now available in one volume from Amazon.

Names

HOMES.  Schoolchildren memorized this to be able to name the Great Lakes.  mnemonic... a Greek word meaning “mindful of memory”.  Now the current U.S. President has taken away decades of familiar to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America!  HAMES. And Canada will still have that body of water with its original name.

I live near Lake Ontario.  Before 9-11, my family could park a car in Buffalo, walk across the Rainbow Bridge, wave to the customs official who waved back, and walk into Canada at Niagara Falls. The swimming ‘beach’ in Rochester, NY is at Lake Ontario. To me, a native New Yorker with the Atlantic Ocean, a lake has no ‘beach’, but to those in this part of the state the sand in front of the lake provides what they’re used to.  

The age-old familiar HOMES can vanish with the point of a pen, but only on the American side of this body of water. How confusing! And what makes the “O” more American than the “H” or “M” or “E” or “S”.  Why weren’t these even considered, although not altered?

Long ago, New York City was a grid, never confusing as streets and avenues were in sequential numbers. Then a change: Avenue of the Americas.  Where was that?  Why? I had to look it up: 6th Avenue.  Well, six followed five and such, but in 1945 the sequence was forever interrupted. 

“The Tappan Zee Bridge was “named after the local Native American Tappan tribe and the Dutch word for sea, "Zee."  (Definition from Google). The name was pretty to pronounce and write out, and historically significant, then in 2017 it was renamed Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. 

New York City’s Triborough Bridge linked three boroughs. Manhattan, Queens, and The Bronx.  The name made total sense.  Then in 2008, it was renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge!  And it wasn’t even a New Yorker being ‘honored’.  Why take a bridge’s name that literally tells a driver what connections are possible with travel on that and name it for a person!

I used to take my bicycle to an area that became Idlewild Airport. I thought the beautiful name was so fitting for that land. Built over a golf course by that name, it seemed perfect.  In 1963 it was renamed the John F. Kennedy International Airport.  Why didn’t Kennedy’s name get used where he grew up or lived, which wasn’t New York or Long Island? 

The Sackler family provided painkiller medicines and were generous contributors to museums and other institutions. Now their name is stripped from the places that happily took funding. 

In the 1940s, on the back of Playbills from theatres, there was a picture of Arthur Godfrey smoking cigarette to promote a brand of cigarettes.  In tiny letters, there was a disclaimer, but cigarettes were so ‘important’ to smoke; Pall Mall handed out small boxes of them free on college campuses in the 1950's to get students to want that brand.  Why weren’t cigarette companies shamed, as Sackler was? 

General Robert E. Lee had his name removed from almost any place it had ever appeared.  Why?  He was part of history.

President Clinton certainly took the ‘sacred’ Oval Office and used it for a sexual pleasure.  Why is his name still allowed to be part of Washington, or he allowed to speak at a commencement? 

Banned books.  Banned names.  Renaming for a mayor, or ‘famous’ figure. Erasing history from Tappan Zee Bridge onward.  What person will decide Lake Superior isn’t ‘superior’ at all and change that next; well, then HOMES will again have to have a new mnemonic.

Note from the editors:  this brief meditation resonated with our memories of Argentina renaming cities, states, schools, streets for President Perón and his wife Eva Perón while he was in power. We associate the practice with authoritarianism.  It is very sad to find it now common in the USA.