Me?

The prompt at Weekend Wordsmith says this:

YOURSELF ~ What is it about you? Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Do you know yourself? Tell us about you.

Never have I had any trouble telling people about me! Does that make me egocentric? Maybe, but I hope not. Usually telling someone something about me reminds them of something about them, and I learn more about my friends that way.

In high school we were required to write an autobiography in English class. An autobiography about a teenager? Yeah, right! All we could write about was our family and how we fit into it. I was named Bonnie for my mother's only sister and Lillian for my father's only sister, and therein lies the problem. Lillian's mother, my grandmother, could see the writing on the wall, that I would be called Bonnie because that name came first. So she set out to nip that little problem in the bud. How? By giving me a nickname. I don't know how many nicknames she tried, but I do know about Teensy and Bitsy. Those were suggested because I weighed only five pounds when I was born and could "sit" in my father's hand. (No, that isn't a photo of MY toes ... we didn't have color photos in the olden days.)

Bitsy stuck, but please don't call me Bitsy. I hated the name, especially when I grew taller than the other children, many of whom had to crane their necks to look up, up, way up at me. On the first day of first grade the teacher called each of us up to her desk and asked, "And what are you called?" The mothers were standing around the wall, and mine assumed I'd go into a long story (as I'm doing here). But no! I said, simply and distinctly, "Bonnie!" And I've been Bonnie ever since.