“You’re a Smith, we’re different,” is what I was always told by my father. Despite its personal meaning, it has never escaped me that it is an oxymoron. Smith is the single most common surname in the United States- there is nothing different about it. However, being a Smith, or more accurately being Neal Smith’s child, is probably what has haunted me more than any of the other ghosts in my life. If I had to be branded with a letter in the same fashion as Hester Prynne of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter was- a scarlet A for Adulteress that was sewn into her clothes for the rest of her life- I would pick an S for Smith. Unfortunately, I have already been branded in a sort; it is my name. I am constantly being torn apart by trying to
