Why I changed my last name
Synesthesia! (and a few other reasons)
When I started posting these old sketchbook comics here a year ago, I thought I’d try to do it in chronological order… starting with my first sketchbook from 1996 and going along from there. I haven’t always stuck to that! And this week, I’m once again picking a random out-of-order subject, because I happened to notice a page dated November 23, 2000. That’s 24 years ago!
I drew this picture and photocopied it onto a bunch of coloured sheets of paper which I handed out to friends. It was an invitation to my name-changing party!
I used to live on 5A Street in Calgary, back then (here are some comics about my cool apartment).
Why did I change my last name? If you’ve gotten to know me in the past twenty-five years, you might not know that I ever had a previous name! My old last name was Burgener (which prompted an old friend to call me “the Burgeness” to my amusement/annoyance). The name “Burgener” came with my great-grandfather from Switzerland to Canada in the early 1900s. But after growing up with this name, I wasn’t a fan!
There were many small things about it that bugged me, including:
- At least in Canada, it’s a hard name to say and spell. (It’s a hard “G,” but most people think it’s a soft “G.”
- Since my family was the only Burgener family in Calgary, and since some of my family members were fairly well-known around town, it was pretty easy to figure out who I was… and in my twenties, I wanted to be known for myself.
- But the biggest reason was probably synesthesia. What’s that, you may ask? Wikipedia describes it this way: “a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” For me, letters have colours. The mix of letters in the name “Burgener” is an unpleasant purple-orange combination. I’ve just never liked it. When I told people I wanted to change my name because I didn’t like the colour, that was the first time I found out that everybody else did not see colours with letters, too! And that’s when I learned about synesthesia.
So I started to think about whether it might be possible to change my last name. Here’s another drawing book page from 1999.
In case you’re interested, here are the “heroes” I mentioned:
- I wrote about Feininger in this comic (it’s from the first few pages of the first drawing book!).
- Paul Atreides… well, I honestly haven’t been paying much attention in recent years but I feel like there’s a lot of hype about some new versions of Dune. (The 1984 version is good enough for me. Max von Sydow is in it! How could any other version be better?)
- Lawrence of Arabia… if you haven’t seen it, do something about that.
- Cassiel: He’s the hero of one of my favourite movies, Faraway, So Close! The sequel to Wings of Desire. But it’s even better. (Lou Reed, Willem Dafoe, Peter Falk, Horst Buchholz… heck, Gorbachev makes a cameo in this movie!!)
- And of course Bob Dylan needs no introduction (but if you are looking for Bob Dylan comics, you can find them here.)
Anyway, fast forward to late 2000, and I did change my last name. It was hard to find a name that would work. These were my criteria:
- I wanted a name that didn’t have big associations with other people I knew, so it could be a bit unique to me.
- I wanted it to start with H, because I really liked the quiet, understated initials “sh.”
- It had to have good colours! “Hester” is a really nice rusty red-brown colour. Perfect!
- A few other reasons that are too obscure to explain in this post! Anyway, here’s what I wrote in the drawing book when I changed my name.
I said I wanted a name that was unique to me, but of course there are other Hesters out there. When I first thought of that name, I went to my computer (the internet was new!) and typed in “Hester.” The first thing that came up was “Dylan and Hester.” It was an article about Bob Dylan’s early collaboration with folk singer Carolyn Hester. (That was the first time I heard of her.) That seemed like a good omen!
It wasn’t until after I chose my last name that I happened to look at a CD by one of the favourite bands of my youth, Crowded House, and discovered that their drummer was called Paul Hester. I felt like I was meeting a long-lost relative! Here he is, upside down on this album cover from 1988. I hung this picture on the wall of my living room, on the night of the Hester-Fest in 2000.
Paul Hester died in 2005 and his bandmates wrote a whole album dedicated to his memory. It’s one of my favourite albums by Crowded House, or by anybody. It’s sombre and sad and full of love and hope. Of course, I’m not remotely connected to Paul Hester. But I think we can create meanings and connections out of the things that are important to us. Kurt Vonnegut, in the novel Cat’s Cradle, wrote about his idea of the “karass,” a family of people you adopt for yourself. (Karass – “A group of people linked in a cosmically significant manner, even when superficial linkages are not evident.”) I feel connected to the other Hesters out there, just as I feel connected to other people I don’t have any formal connections with - the people reading this post, for example. That’s you!
Whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you get to choose the names and the people that make you happy! And I hope they come with nice colours, too.