My brothers gave child-me the nickname Bones presumably because, when they looked at me, they thought she is nothing but skin and _____. The playwright Titus Plautus gets the credit, earned or otherwise, for saying your name is your destiny but what, after all, can Romans tell us today? Suppose instead that a name is the past come to build a bridge to cross over? If this is true, I could be bones of my parents’ beloved Carib birds: a lesser Antillean tanager, Cuban grassquit, Jamaican crow; the bones of ancestors stolen from Africa: the Hottentot teal, brown booby. Or maybe after all, all bones are just playing into the game as in the game of dominoes where the goal is to get the die from the boneyard. On the other hand, it could be that music makes all the difference: this old man, he played one . . . give a dog a bone . . . this old man, he played five . . . with a knick-knack paddy whack . . . and never forget to look in your kitchen — to put bones in your stock, bones to add flavor to a mirepoix: calcium, phosphorus, magnesium; to use a boning knife to separate the flesh of the salmon or trout or bass. Their bones may be as small as yours or mine: stapedius (to keep the voices in your head from driving you crazy) or as large as the femur or tibia, each fighting for supremacy.
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