Changing Names

Since moving to Italy, I have learned that my name is "Samuel Joseph Littlefair-Wallace."

To live in Italy, you need a tax code. The tax code is some sixteen-character smorgasbord of letters and numbers from your life. A business might ask you for your tax code for any ordinary transaction, like ordering a piece of furniture. Your name and your tax code must match. Since my tax code is based on the name in my passport ("Samuel Joseph Littlefair-Wallace"), that means that I now use the name "Samuel Joseph Littlefair-Wallace" in all of my Italian dealings.

In elementary school, I was "Sam Wallace," which felt simple and definitive. Then, one day in junior high, the secretary called for me on the P.A., asking for "Sam Littlefair-Wallace." Everyone looked at me like a bomb had just dropped, "What did they call you???" Apparently, a secret extra name is a big deal.

When I asked my mom about it, she disclosed that she had finally enrolled me in school by my legal name rather than the paternal shorthand I was familiar with (an assertion of authority some years after my parent's divorce). From that day, I was "Sam Littlefair-Wallace." I liked having a long name. It felt special. Sometimes I would brag about my middle names, too. "I have seven names" I would say dramatically, prompting gasps. In high school, my drama teacher took to calling me by the Tibetan name I had been given as an infant, "Tashi Dawa," putting his own personal spin on it, "Tashi Wawa."

I kept the hyphenation well into my twenties, until it started to chafe. I always felt embarrassed spelling it for a customer service person, and I couldn't fit it into a Twitter handle. Plus, I was starting to think about marriage and family. I surely wasn't planning to lend a hyphenated surname to my wife or children.

So, I sat my dad down. "Dad, I want to go by Sam Littlefair." Littlefair is less common than Wallace, so it's better for SEO. (I didn't realize at the other time that there are at least two other blond millennial Sam Littlefairs who also work in IT.)

I also felt a sense of pride in preserving a unique name. I once read online that "Littlefair" was a name given to English orphans. I have no idea where I got that, though, because years later when I suggested this etymology to my mom she laughed at me in disbelief. "It just means small and light-skinned!" I scoured the internet for my original source, but it was gone. I had thought of us as a family of orphans. My mom's mom was an orphan. My mom's dad was a bastard. This was a lineage of non-lineage. But apparently it wasn't.

Dad was okay with the change. I was surprised when my boss seemed excited about it, "Should I change it in the masthead!?" I updated all of my social media profiles, but I never changed it legally — that seemed like too much trouble. After all, it was mostly for my personal brand.

Then I moved to Scotland. The game of moving to a new country is forms. Lots of forms. Dealing with formal matters, I found myself spelling out my full name regularly. "Littlefair. Littlefair. Like 'small circus.' Yes I can spell it. L... I... T... T... L... E... F... A... I... R... Yes. Then a hyphen. Yep. Then 'Wallace', W... Oh! Yes. Wallace as in William."

You don't need to tell a Scot how to spell "Wallace." So I started defaulting to it. "Sam Wallace," it came back around. Simple. Definitive. And, in Scotland, quite respectable too. I would use it for little things like restaurant reservations. All the while, I was investigating my Wallaceness.

I researched the origin of our Wallace branch back to a small town in the northeast. I plumbed a Facebook group for the town, and found a blond-haired Wallace woman posting about school fundraisers. These are my people, I thought. Claire and I did a road-trip in the area, visiting the farm where my ancestors lived. There, I found the lineage of non-lineage I had been grasping at in "Littlefair."

No matter how hard I try, I have no prior personal connection to Scotland beyond statistical demographics and an appreciation for the bagpipes. Scots bristle when they hear someone with a North American accent claim to be Scottish. As Ewan McGregor says in Trainspotting, "It's shite being Scottish!" Sometimes a Scot would say to me, "I have family in Canada!" and I would rankle them by responding, "I have family in Scotland — two centuries ago!"

Wallace and Littlefair are each a needle on a compass pointing me to somewhere I've never been. Every time I took the train from Glasgow to London, I would snap a photo of the "Lancashire" sign for my mum as the train rolled through the station. "The ancestral home of the Littlefairs!" she responded. I thought Lancashire looked nice, but I wouldn't really know — I've never been.

Then I moved to Italy, and I became "Samuel Joseph Littlefair-Wallace," reminding me that my name isn't a chronicle of where I've been — or who my ancestors were. It's a relationship between myself and the world. It's a token by which others hold their relationship with me — whether legal, professional, familial, or practical. In that sense, my name is always changing from day to day, person to person.

In Italy, "Samuel Joseph Littlefair-Wallace" is also useful as a phonetic sound. For Italians, "Samuel" is also easier to understand than "Sam." That's what you learn when you're making a restaurant reservation: "Sam. Sam. [In an Italian accent] Samuel. Grazie."

Last week, I made a restaurant reservation for me and some friends. When they asked for my name, I adopted my Italian accent, "Sam-u-el." But the waiter on the phone didn't get it. I repeated a couple of times with different inflections, "Sam-well. Sam-oo-elle." Finally they got it, "Ah, okay. Seven thirty."

When we arrived at the restaurant, I told the waiter I had a reservation for four. "Ah yes!" she replied. "For 'Sandal'?"