he shall be known as Jerome

 I've had a lifelong proclivity for personality pareidolia in objects that's almost on the level of my sleepwalking in explaining my curiously haunted life.

There's a key incident in my childhood that's fondly remembered by everyone in the family and many of the people who have come to know me well understand it as a telling moment in where I come from. I was maybe nine or ten, it was the family meal, which we enjoyed around a table, all together, just like a scene out of some kind of nostalgic propaganda.

I reached for a poppy seed roll, but it was tantalizingly just out of the way, in a basket over the seam where the leaf slotted into the old oak table with lion feet.

"Son," my father said, "do you want a roll?"

"Yeah."

"Which roll?"

"That one," I said, pointing with the prepubescent tension of a Diane Arbus model. My dad's hand hovered over the rolls, annoyingly close, and I hoped he wouldn't touch them all with his big hairy mitt.

"This one?" he asked. I nodded. "You want Jerome?"

"What?"

"That's Jerome Roll."

"It's a Jerome roll? What's a Jerome roll?" I asked. My mother, knowing, rolled her eyes and smiled a Mona Lisa smile.

"It's not a Jerome roll. It's Jerome Roll. That's it's name."

He picked up the roll, and handed it over. Of course, I couldn't eat the damn thing.

It had a name.

Jerome sat there, on my placemat, throughout the meal, and I fussily picked my way through the freshly steamed vegetables from our garden that were a kind of healthy torture for me, making sure nothing touched anything else on the plate in an inappropriate manner. At the end of the meal, I picked up Jerome and started up the stairs.

"You're not going to eat that?" my mother asked. I furrowed my brow and shook my head, because sometimes, grownups just didn't have a clue.

I carried Jerome around for a few weeks. He lost most of his poppy seeds, but otherwise survived my patronage in remarkable condition. I put him in the captain's chair in homemade spaceships, had him trekking through the brambles in the backyard or sitting guard as I broke the rules and climbed into our stone-lined well, and took him spelunking through the Chlordane-saturated dust of the crawlspace under the log section of our house. The dog was unusually interested in me for much of this time, but I kept her at bay.

At night, I'd tuck Jerome under the edge of my pillow and go to sleep, listening to the house creaking and groaning the way it would, punctuated by the occasional muffled scrabbling of a mouse running in the walls. It seemed like the noises of the mice were increasing, but I didn't think much of it.

One morning, though, Jerome was gone. There were crumbs and a few poppy seeds, but that was it.

"Jerome!" I screamed the way you scream when a pet's died or run away.

My family made a good faith effort of looking for him, but he was never seen again. My mother pointed out that mice probably came out and ate him in the night, which just added a new and more realistic fear to my terror that a Zuni fetish doll was going to cut up my ankles in the darkness. I took to keeping the broom next to my bed so I could use it to reach over and turn on the light from the bed before I'd step down to the floor.

It's always possible I ate him myself. I did do a lot of sleepwalking then.

We all still call a poppy seed roll a Jerome roll. When I was a contractor to the DEA, and the only one in my company who'd never so much as tried pot and therefore was the guy with the highest clearance available, I was instructed to play it safe and stay away from poppy seeds. When that contract ended, I had a toasted poppy seed bagel, drowning in butter, and relished the gritty greasy happy chewy experience of it without the slightest regret.

Of course, bagels don't have names. Who would name a bagel?