A Name Is a Thing You Lend

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a shop bell, a shelf being stocked, quiet)
Walk down one aisle. Just one. Count the ghosts.

[Verse 1]
Chuck drove. Duncan wrote. The Colonel sold and then complained.
Ettore spelled it wrong on purpose so the register would say it.
Nancy, Lillian and Anna, whose names were never on it.
Betty, who was nobody, and answered all the letters.
Two brothers and a river twenty feet across.
Two brothers in a kitchen who invented it and lost it.

[Chorus]
A name is a thing you lend.
You think you're giving it away for a while.
It goes out into the world and it learns to walk without you,
and it doesn't come back, and it doesn't need you, and it's fine.
A name is a thing you lend.
Nobody ever tells you that the loan does not have a term.

[Verse 2]
Halston, who could not be Halston. Wally, who made the joke first.
Sara Lee, who was eight. Melinda Lou, who was eight.
And Orville, in his bow tie, who is the only one of these
who got to the end of it still holding his own name.
One out of fifteen. That's the ratio. That's the odds.
And he had to fight the ad men just to be allowed to be himself.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
I don't think it's a tragedy. I want to be clear.
Most of them chose it. Most of them were paid.
And a name outliving you is what everybody wants —
we call it being remembered when it happens to a poet.
It's only strange because it happened to a shoe. To a cake. To a jar.
The immortality worked. It just didn't take them with it.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the shop bell again, the door closing)
Say them out loud sometime.
Chuck. Duncan. Ettore. Nancy. Lillian. Anna.
They were people. They were all of them people.