Having a female name has never bothered me.
I cannot recall ever being teased,
although some folks I meet are confused,
thinking I couldn’t be Leslie
and wondering in what way
I presume to represent her.

Leslie as a male name wasn’t popular
even as long ago, 1945, as I was born.
Leslie, according to babynames.com,
peaked in 1902 at slightly less
than 2 percent of all names given
to boys born in the U.S.A. that year.

However, “there was a period before 1945
when more boys were given the name.” I ride
the tail of an echo! “From 1946 on,
increasingly more girls than boys
were named Leslie. In 1997, girls named
Leslie outnumbered boys by 18 times.”

I get lots of junk mail addressed
to Ms. Leslie Gottesman,
and my wife and I get commercial appeals
aimed at lesbian couples.

But I like the name Leslie. As a young man
I was known as Leslie.
I like Leslie better than I like Les—
though Les is okay and is how everyone
knows me, except bureaucrats.

Some things do bother me.
No matter what they guess my full name might be
(Lester? Laszlo?) almost everyone
who meets me riffs in some way on
the proposition “less is more.”
It seems to be irresistible, often
even apologized for, and then delivered!
I never know what to say to this icebreaker

My last name translates from German
as “man of God,” which I always, humbly,
annotate that no doubt one or more
rabbinic father-son franchises, dynasties even,
existed in every eastern European shtetl
such as my grandparents fled
to the U.S.A. from. But I think that more likely
flourished hard-core layabouts
supported and tended by wives and daughters
while they studied the Talmud, daydreamed,
and maybe drank. I’m sure
every shtetl had several of these,
stoners of their time and targets
of the sarcasm “god’s man.”

But my pettest peeve is my own
unsuppressable reaction
to the homonyms of Les and Leslie.
Whether it’s a meeting around a table
or an outdoor rally of thousands,
if the holder of the floor concludes
her remarks with “Lastly…”—I snap
to attention as though it’s me
who’s been directly addressed.

I have met another Les Gottesman,
Lester Gottesman, a doctor I saw
when I was taken ill in New York one time.
An affable, Irish-looking red-haired man,
he stared at pages in a folder on his desk
for a long time and shook his head.

“I’m not used to seeing my name
on that part of the chart,” he said.

by Les Gottesman
San Francisco, CA