A plough
When I was little and living at one of the poshest Sofia streets, we had a tiny garden before the building where my grandmother had planted several Delphiniums. I was told that this plant is what my name means.
Much later, I got a book on Astronomy and there I learned that my name has a second meaning — that of Orion. It turned out, farmers who would go out very early in autumn to plough the land would see Orion in the sky and liken it to a plough. A plough in Bulgarian is “рало” [ralo] so my name would mean “that thing looking like a plough”. Or similar.
It might have been about that time that I first associated myself with my name, thinking night skies and all of that. Today I associate even better, but I think plough.
It’s how I go through life; like a plough.
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Went to a new dentist the other day and after making a mistake in the preliminary information form of swapping name and surname fields, I was addressed by my name instead of surname. Slightly startling for a moment, because it would otherwise never happen, but after the initial surprise I felt a sense of content. Germans can not distinguish between my name and surname, but in a way them getting it wrong is more right, because it’s more me.
