A Brief History of L. Squared

I didn’t always answer to the acronym LL. In the beginning I was LC. Then I spent a few years as LD., back to LC for a while before finally acquiring the L. Squared tag. It didn’t come naturally, though. It was bestowed upon me through the union of marriage and that funky custom where the woman forfeits her own name for that of her husband’s. Maybe not such a bad thing, considering that she’d probably gotten her original surname from her father. Certainly not from her mother who probably had to forfeit her own name when she married, albeit that too was her father’s - and back and back like that through a long line of men’s names. But I’m digressing, aren’t I? Where was I? Ah yes, square one.

Anyway, while I was ecstatic about my upcoming nuptials, I wasn’t too enamored with the name change, (and not due to the aforementioned reason.) It was the name itself that gave me cause for concern - I didn’t like how it had sort of a sing-song sound to it. And to add insult to injury, I soon learned that, not only would I wear the sing-song name for the rest of my life, but I also had to share it with my future husband’s cousin. Seems she’d been LL her whole life (even had the same middle name as me) and while she thought it was amusing that I’d be joining her in the ranks of L. Squared, I did not.

And yet, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been involved in name hijacking. The first time was back when I was a teenager, traipsing about as the only LC in the small farm town where I grew up. I was around sixteen when my older brother married an L. She too shared my exact name right down to the spelling and pronunciation of the middle name. And since the newlyweds were straight out of high school without a penny between them or a place to live, our father (the guy with the name), let them move in with us. It made for some interesting mail sorting. Not to mention the screening of inbound phone calls - conversations that went something like this:

“Hello, is L there?”

“Which one?"

“LC”

“Which one?”

“L A C”

“Yeah, which one?”

“Huh?”

So again, I found myself poised to share my name with someone else. But I realized the other LL didn’t seem any worse for wear having spent her life singing her name. So I eventually got over feeling odd about it and I actually learned to love it. In fact, when I begun my writing “career” (one that has yet to take off), I was contemplating a pen name, something catchy, something people might remember something . . . sing songy! But as it turned out, I already had one! And besides, it's kind of fun having a bit of alliteration in my everyday life.