When my parents divorced – my mother who still hates an ex-husband in his grave for 12 years – wanted me to change my last name. I held on to my name when I got married. I was and remain a Walker. It shocks people, just a bit. Keeping your last name doesn’t seem to fit the mold of the conservative woman. People are surprised to hear that Mr. Spit and I don’t share a last name. I don’t make a huge issue about it, but I will correct people. I am, always was and always will be, a Walker. I am the last of the Walkers and in idle moments, I think about what this means. There is an Uncle (estranged) and I. We are the only ones with this name. In idle moments I think back to my childhood memories and the stories that form the touch points of my history and I think about what it means to be the last of anything.

I hold on to my last name, flying in the face of convention and making others uneasy because it is a touch point and a talisman – a marker of something that was greater and larger than just me.  I don’t completely know what it means to be a Walker – instead I fill out a large space with some small stories and recollections, scattered values given me by others. I do not have a common experience of being a Walker. The notion of my family, the people who gave me my last name and hold this last name with me are a bit alien to me – they speak not necessarily another language, but we never seem to speak the same language at the same time.

This last round of remembrance started simply enough – my favourite aunt sent me a photo of my father as a baby. Each time this happens I hold on to it, fiercely, adding it to the large space, seeing the emptiness chased out a bit more. Perhaps it would shock you but I have one photo of my dad and I, and only one. I have it because it escaped my mother’s notice by living at my God Mother’s house. She kept it at her house, possibly squirreled away and maybe just overlooked, but it remained out of reach until a few years ago when I got it.

So, there I sit, on my father’s knee, with a stupid red ribbon in my hair and wearing a navy blue dress. My father wears a grey sweater and a sort of smile, but I am grinning and my father’s eyes have the hint of a twinkle that still makes my heart ache – remembering that when he was a good father he was very, very good indeed.

The photo is tucked in a scrapbook, placed on a whole page of photo’s of me as a girl. To look at it you would not realize it is the only of it’s kind. It’s not an especially good photo, but it is a photo.

I thought of this photo when my aunt sent me my father’s baby photo. I looked at him and and I went and found a photo of Gabe and there was connection. I realized, just then, that I brought someone else into this space with me as well.

Along with the photos have come emails of memories – all 3 living siblings chiming in, remember when. They were and are remarkably honest about their childhoods, the very good and the very bad. It often co-existed in the same story. I don’t know the stories they are telling, not even to spark some recollection of a story I have heard. These stories are from so long ago that I have no frame of reference. I accept what I see and am told with open eyes, no lenses colouring the words.

Each story told me becomes part of something I tuck away. I read and become a bit more full. This thing that is who I am, this thing that I have brought with me, this name that I carry with me – this name. It means something. A bit more of something. I become a bit more Walker.

Last night I looked at the website, I traced my name back quite a ways. It has always been my mother’s family that could trace their name, but suddenly, I was connected on both sides.

Florence and Ray are the parent’s of Howard. Who is the brother of Debbie and David and Robin and Ken. Howard is the Father of Cheryl. Cheryl is the mother of Gabriel.

Grounded. Given roots and wings. And strangely, as I sat here typing this I found myself crying, just a bit, and the strange and still familiar sense of fitting in.