Eamon Glen Hubbard

Our son and Signe's brother, Eamon Glen Hubbard, was born just over a week ago. All went well, Merry and Eamon are healthy, now we are all home again.

We had a harder time naming Eamon than we had with Signe, a fact we explained first with gender (we had several girl names we liked when Signe was born, but had trouble finding inspiration for boy names). We knew (or perhaps justified) that we needed to see him before we named him, as we had with Signe, and indeed, his scrunchy face and head of thick blond hair prompted us to eliminate most of our list.

Eamon was a name I first liked because it seemed vaguely western and cowboy-ish (though perhaps this was just a liminal influence of Longmire). Caring for him in our room, the name took on a certain appropriateness when Merry realized it was a near-anagram of "no name"! We settled tentatively on it and started looking for a complementary middle name.

We first considered some options which "flowed well" (e.g., Eamon Gray, Eamon James) but these held no meaning to us. On the last morning in the hospital, I suggested Glen, telling Merry that Glen Canyon was a place my grandmother had first told me about. It was her I had most wished to link Signe's name to, though no workable opportunity had presented itself then.

What does it mean to name a person for a place, albeit one eliciting association to another person? First, it's worth noting that "Glen" is actually two references - the specific Glen Canyon in Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, named by John Wesley Powell on the 1869 expedition of the Colorado River and submerged beneath Lake Powell in the 1960s, and glen, the term for a secluded valley. Extrapolating from the latter, Eamon Glen implies a fictional or undiscovered place, ("a glen named Eamon") and, to me, at least, is euphonically pleasing (i.e., Tolkien's "Cellar Door").

This also provides a foundation beneath the specific place of Glen Canyon, a place neither my grandmother nor myself ever visited (though I did jet ski on Lake Powell in 2002 and visit Hole in the Rock in 2008) and which Eamon and I remain unable to visit - at least, until such a fortunate future age when Glen Canyon dam may be removed.

At that time, the sandstone will be 'bleached' by the water and the old riverbed and stream beds covered in a thick layer of sediment, much of which may be toxic. Riparian zones could take decades to reappear, and the canyon's original biodiversity may never recover. Assuming Glen Canyon re-emerges, it will resemble a wasteland, of no use to either of its previous constituencies - those who enjoyed the canyon, and those who enjoy the lake. What meaning could someone possibly find in that third state?

It wouldn't stay inhospitable forever. And within that slow recovery it powerfully evokes the archetype of redemption, in which something lost is recovered, in a diminished form which nevertheless retains a core essence. Or stated from the perspective of the redeemer: the process by which meaning is derived from loss (such as the loss of a loved one), honoring its memory and finding new life within it.

My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago, yet she is often the one I think of even now when I am struggling with moral decisions - what would she think if I did [x]? Clearly there is still life in my memory of her, a small part of which I give to Eamon Glen. We are thrilled he is here with us.