A small argument with Flannery O’Conner and Thomas Wolfe**

Before I made my
self Hulga and frowned all day
long, my name was Joy.

** In Good Country People Hulga, daughter or Mrs. Hopewell, had been named Joy at birth but, “as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then, she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.”

**Echoing this rather negative sentiment about life in Look Homeward Angel, Thomas Wolfe wrote: “Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.”

**HOWEVER, I take heart at the image of my joyful beginning and the knowledge that I hold it, along with everything else, right here inside of me!