Hey There, Fuzzy

“Hey, Stinky.”
“What up, Stumpy?”
I’ve called Mary early this morning – too early, apparently, for us to be concerned with calling each other by our real names.
It is one my personal downfalls – an area where I have the opportunity for growth, some might say – being quite bad with names. I blame it on the number of times we moved as children.
My brother, too, has this hole in his social education. We hear/remember what we deem to be important and leave the rest.
“Hey! Pearl! I saw that guy again the other day.”
“What guy?”
“Oh, you know. What’s-his-lips. The guy with the teeth.”
“And the finger?”
“Yep.”
The best part of that conversation, of course, is that I could repeat it to my sister and she’d say, “Oh, yeah! DuWayne! How’s he doin’?”
DuWayne, by the way, is doing fine; and while he’s still missing that finger, he’s thinking of getting front teeth.
And so while I am very good at remembering faces/dance moves/musical preferences, I’m pretty bad at names.
I’m not alone.
Mary’s Jon refers to anyone he can’t remember as “Fuzzy”.
“Mary! Did Fuzzy call?”
Heavy sigh from Mary. She suffers, this one. “Which Fuzzy?”
“Fuzzy Number One. The big Fuzzy.”
She rolls her eyes at me, a smile on her lips. She shakes her head ever so slightly. “Jon, so help me, I’m gonna come over there…”
He winks at me. “Fuzzy! The Fuzzy with the 2002 Chrysler Sebring bumper cover in our living room.”
Jon, a man in blurring, dizzying motion, has hijacked their tiny living room with a replacement bumper cover for one of his many automotive-repair clients.
Mary manages to laugh and threaten him at the same time. “Oh, my God, Jon, I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill you, then I’m gonna make you supper, and then I’m gonna kill you again.”
Jon laughs.
And you can almost hear him thinking:

What’d she just say about supper?