Kim

Last night I had a dream.

I dreamed I met a young woman named Kim Cellére. (Note the diacritic over the second e – it’s called an acute – nice touch for a dream, I thought.) And before you complain; yes, I know ‘Kim’ is not a French name but it’s what she said. (It was a dream; go with it.) And when I asked her to spell her last name, she spelled it in French. That is, she used French pronunciations for the letters. Which is interesting, because we don’t normally think about the fact that our alphabet is pronounced differently in other languages. Take the letter ‘C’ … we pronounce it like ‘see’, but in French it’s pronounced like ‘say’. In French, the letter ‘E’ is pronounced ‘er’ (as in ‘her’). So when dream-girl Kim spelled her last name, basically, it was Greek to me. I mean French. How is that spelled? Comment ça s'écrit?

If you think getting the spelling of her name was difficult, you should have seen me trying to get her phone number written down.  Like letters, numbers in other languages are pronounced differently than they are in English. In English it’s “one-two-three”; in French it’s “un-deux-trois” (pronounced approximately like “unh-der-twah”). What’s that phone number, again? Uh, one more time? It was futile. Why did I study Spanish? The only time I’ve actually needed to know another language was in this dream, and I studied the wrong language. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro,” … those I remember. You know the expression “in your dreams”? Well, for me, apparently, not even in my dreams. I can’t catch a break here.

Coincidentally (or maybe not coincidentally), in my previous life I wrote several short stories involving a female character named Kim. That was at a time when I didn’t know anyone named Kim. Perhaps that’s why I chose the name Kim for my character. The name was pure, unspoiled, unsullied by association with a real person. I could ascribe any attributes or qualities to the character I wished and there would be no discordant “Hmm, that doesn’t feel like something a Kim would do.” Since then, I’ve met several Kims. The woman next door is named Kim. The woman across the street is named Kim. Her neighbor, who just moved away, was named Kim. In Roanoke, I knew a bartender named Kim (she was in college studying biochemistry or something equally arcane – I wonder what became of her) and when I moved to this city and dropped into the pub, there I met another bartender named Kim.

The dream went on and on, but what does it mean? Something? Nothing? The dream was nice – interesting, even – while it lasted, but perhaps nothing more than a potpourri (a French word) of memories and experiences thrown together – shaken, not stirred – with a touch of influence from the chicken samosa with dal rajastani I ate for dinner.

Footnote: the girl’s name Kim is a short form of Kimberly from Old English Cyneburg meaning “royal forest”. Kim is also a boy’s name, a short form of names like Kimball. Kim is also a Korean name meaning “gold”. Cellere and Celere appear to be Italian, as are Cèllere and Cellére. There is also an ancient manuscript called the Cèllere Codex.