The Daniels

Daniels have been important in my life. That’s not to say that only Daniels have been important, but that I’ve had a higher-than-average number of Daniels present in my life, and some of them have been incredibly important to me. For starters, my brother’s name is Daniel. When our mom was pregnant with him, before they knew the sex, they asked what I wanted to name the baby—I said Kimberly. Then they had a boy and named him Daniel. (A few years later they had a girl, who they did in fact name Kimberly. Pretty surprised they took the suggestion of their three-year-old, but I stand by it, and I hope you like your name, Kim.) My brother has been the longest-standing Daniel in my life, and he is the Daniel to whom I compare all others. My brother seems to grasp things best when he can physically grasp them, he learns through physical contact and action. Perhaps for this reason, my brother is very gifted musically, and he can play an assortment of instruments. When I picture my brother completely at ease and completely himself, I picture him playing the guitar and looking off into the distance at nothing in particular, not thinking, just playing. He can be explosively emotional, in both the good and the bad. He is a bit of a hypochondriac, which I can understand, because my anxiety has often led me down the WebMD, self-diagnoses rabbit-hole, much to my chagrin. My brother will talk to you about literally anything, and he won’t walk away when the conversation gets hard. He will often forget his keys, phone, wallet or anything else important that one shouldn’t forget. I’ve had many people tell me that he’s the funniest person they’ve ever met in real life, and it doesn't surprise me a bit. This first Daniel in my life set the bar for all the other Daniels I would later meet, of which there have been many. Sitting down to write this, I tried to count them all and I came up with 17 different Daniels that I could identify. I’m sure that means that there have been more and I’ve only just forgotten some of them, but capping it at 17 is still an eyebrow-raising number of Daniels, don’t you think?

My husband’s name is Daniel Smith. We met at a coffee shop in 2010; I was singing and playing the piano, and he was behind the counter making people laugh and serving lattes. As I was leaving, he stopped me in the parking lot and said, “Hey, do you have a boyfriend?” My long-distance boyfriend and I had just broken up earlier that week, so I arched an eyebrow and simply said, “No.” He then inquired, “Can I have your phone number and take you out on a date sometime?” To which I replied, flattered and amused and a little bit flustered, “Uh, okay.” A few weeks later he texted me asking if I wanted to go get a fancy Italian dinner and then go swimming in his parents’ pool. Years later confessed to me that this was all part of his fool-proof system to get laid. Take ‘em out for some spicy Italian sausage, get ‘em to laugh a lot while you’re in the hot tub, and let nature take its course. Apparently eating sausages someone else paid for and sitting in hot chlorinated water makes your date want to bang like crazy. Naturally, I threw a monkey-wrench into his carefully laid plans and I said no, I would not like to go out for a fancy Italian dinner, and I was actually a vegetarian and thought sausage was gross; nor would I like to go to his parent’s house, because I didn’t know him and that just seemed weirdly over-familiar. (I was never good at “dates”—does it show?) I made him a counteroffer: “How about meeting me over at my friend Russell’s house to drink some beers?” Seemingly stunned at being shot down and then asked out on a not-date to drink at the house of some other guy (I’m sure he was thinking, “is Russell’s House a bar? Or am I actually just meeting you to drink beer in some dude’s backyard?”), he agreed to meet me there. We hung out in the backyard with my friends—most of whom were other guys, guys I’d dated, guys I’d known since Middle School—and told crude jokes and smoked gag-inducing quantities of hand-rolled cigarettes. Eventually everyone else passed out on various pieces of furniture or shuffled themselves home, and as he was about to leave I caught his hand and pulled him back and kissed him. He looked stupefied and walked out the front door. He came back in a minute later and kissed me again, as if wanting to prove he would not be out-done, then left again. We’ve been together a decade this past July, and we continue to surprise and delight and attempt to out-fox each other.

At the age of four, when we were still living on a small farm in Minnesota, I made the first “best friend” I can remember having. I don’t remember most of this friendship, it was 27 years ago, but what I can remember is: sitting in a dark closet, surrounded by adult coats and scarves and galoshes, and pretending it was a clubhouse; playing Sonic the Hedgehog on his Sega Genesis; trying to walk in very deep snow and his boots coming off, and rushing back to the house in thrilled panic at the prospect of frostbite; drinking hot chocolate in the little landing between the upstairs and the downstairs of my house; talking while I took a bath and he sat on the floor of the bathroom playing with action figures and feeling like it was a perfectly normal thing that all friends did together. His name, like my husband’s, was also Daniel Smith. Two different people in two different states at two very different times of my life, one my incidental and proximate “best friend” and the other my legally-bound and intentionally-chosen “best friend”, both named Daniel Smith. Not that “Daniel Smith” is an uncommon name—obviously quite the contrary—but still! That’s pretty crazy, right? Pretty unlikely? And what does it mean? Oh, nothing at all, really, but it is a canny and extraordinary coincidence that makes me smile when I think of it.

There were a lot of other Daniels, too. The first boy I ever kissed was named Daniel—we’d been friends since the 4^th grade, we dated briefly a time or two, and we’re still great friends today. I sang with a few Daniels in choir in high school, and I ran cross country with a Daniel, too. I had flings with a couple of different Daniels while I was at NYU, and I dated a Danielle—I like to think she counts as a Daniel. A high school girlfriend’s older brother was a Daniel, and he actually worked with my husband Daniel at that coffee shop where we met. Me and that Daniel had an intense board-game rivalry at one point, and while he seemed exceedingly smart and effortlessly talented to little 21-year-old me, he was also a terribly sore loser. I don’t know if that made him less fun or more fun to play board-games with, because he was insufferable when he lost, but that made it all the more deeply gratifying to beat his pompous ass at Settlers of Catan.

One of my best friends growing up had a twin brother named Daniel, and he was one of the strangest guys I ever met. We were all the same age, but socially he was years behind--at 17 you'd easily have mistaken his mannerisms and maturity for that of a 12 year old. I remember sitting on the swings at a park near our house and watching with uncomfortable fascination and embarrassed awe as my foster-sister explained the female anatomy and the mechanics of reproduction to this Daniel, and wondering what he was thinking and feeling in that moment. As I got older, I worked with a couple of Daniels: one was a barista with me at a Peet’s Coffee, the other was a coffee roaster and trainer for an independent coffee shop called Farley’s that I used to manage. There were Daniels in a few different bands I occasionally went out to see. There was an ex-military, alcoholic skater Daniel that frequented my local bar, and he was by turns intriguing and unsettling and predictable. There was a Daniel who had a recording studio in his garage, and he would put on shows in his backyard, and he always wore a silly hat. There was a strange Daniel whose house I wound up at a few times, presumably an acquaintance of a mutual friend, and there we would smoke weed and get drunk and argue about nothing. I think I spent New Year's Eve of 2014 with that Daniel and two other Daniels. Daniels, Daniels, Daniels. I didn’t think there would be so many. Some of these Daniels weren’t particularly important to me, but I remember them nonetheless, and hold each one with a special distinction in my heart.

If you don't have any Daniels in your life, I'd highly recommend them.