My Solemn Vow

Ugh! I hate my name. Hippy on the one end and old-fashioned on the other. Crystal Faye. It sounds like an exotic dancer. When I was very young, my mother would try to appease my complaints about my name saying, "It means 'Crystal-Clear Faith,' and that is what I want you to have, so beautiful, named after your Grandmother." Awwww, how precious! We have a wide abundance of horrific names in our family, so I guess I should be delighted that I didn't get one of the others (sorry, Ronald Osborne).

Fast forward several years, to the day I uncovered reality. Suddenly, the truth was out there. By there I mean there in the living room. On a particularly lacking summer day, I was kneeling on the shag carpet, thumbing through my parents old vinyl records, for lack of anything better to do and because I have always found it interesting to see what Mom and Dad were like "back in the day" when they were real people, not parents. Suddenly, my thumb stopped,

"Surely NOT!"

I panicked, realizing that I had indeed discovered the cold, hard truth.

Right THERE, sandwiched between Pat Benatar and the Eagles, record after record after record, of a ridiculously long, long-haired, twangy-voiced, country singer that I had surely never heard of before now.

Crystal Gayle.

When approached with the offensive evidence, my Dad vehemently denied both his obession for this artist and that he would ever commit such a grevious sin as to inflict a preformer's name on his first-born child, like some silly teenage groupie. But...the proof is in the pudding and my mother's knowing smirk. So I did the only thing a tween could do to absolutely rebel with every fiber of my being against something that had been decided and thrust on me without my knowledge, permission, or even acceptance, I chopped all my hair off and vowed a solemn vow, my most special promise, to NEVER, EVER in my life let my mane grow past my shoulders.