Hello World

I am inspired to finally start a blog devoted to my own private self's life, Life of Garrett. Welcome friends, family, and strangers alike.

Yesterday morning, Priscilla informed me that, contrary to a determination made prior to our wedding, she is strongly considering retaining the Payne name. She delivered this news in a very cautious and tender tone fearing that I might be upset. Of course, I was not, it being in line with my own ideal of marriage, a partnership of equals, in which the individuality of the wife is not absorbed in that of the husband. An outstanding feature of this new aeon, it has been written, is that the woman is to be no longer the mere vehicle of her male counterpart, but rather armed and militant in her own right, a force to be reckoned with on her own account. Payne is a formidable name and so is Priscilla.

Yet you may still contemplate, however, how this woman, now my wife, given the free choice to adopt a name so ennobling and aesthetically pleasing as Fermoyle (when correctly pronounced, of course) could possibly opt not. Two reasons have so far been given: the first being the mere inconvenience of changing to a new name, a laborious process in itself; the second being a long held dream of hers to eventually acquire a doctorate and enjoy the pleasure of being addressed as Dr. Payne.

This incident, like so many others in my life, is accompanied by an interesting synchronicity. Within a day or two of her announcing her intention to keep her own name, I had been reading a chapter from Gibbon's master work on Roman history in which the jurisprudence of ancient Rome was discussed. I quote from page 460 of volume 4 of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

"...this union on the side of the woman was rigorous and unequal; and she renounced the name and worship of her father's house, to embrace a new servitude, decorated only by the title of adoption: a fiction of the law, neither rational nor elegant, bestowed on the mother of a family the strange character of sister to her own children and of daughter to her husband or master, who was invested with the plenitude of paternal power."

How times change.