Tom Sawyer

I was leaving a funeral home Friday after visiting a family when I heard this guy yell “Hey Tom”. It was this guy we knew from the neighborhood where we lived about 12 years ago. I never knew him real well. So, he came up to me and said, “You’re Tom, right? Tom Sawyer?” I assured him that I was not Tom Sawyer and that Tom Sawyer had been a fictional character in some Mark Twain writings a while back. So then he said, “But you used to go by Tom Sawyer, right?” At this point I was baffled. I do not have a period of my life when I had been hit on the head or had some type of accident or anything that would result in memory loss. I did have a “California Name” in college but I didn’t use it much and nobody remembers that. (Except me. My California name was Chad Stevens.) If the guy in the funeral home would have called me Chad Stevens that would have been cool. At least he didn’t call me Huckleberry Finn, friend of the fictional Tom Sawyer. That would have been weird. Maybe I shoulda called him Huckleberry Finn. But I didn’t want to get him mad. He’s a big guy.

If somebody else calls me Tom Sawyer I guess I’ll have to go back and check my old yearbooks and stuff and see if that was ever my nickname.