Don’t feel bad if you don’t have a name day - it’s okay. Imagine living here.

In seventh grade two girls in my class felt bad for me because I didn’t have a middle name. They had trouble coming to terms with the fact that my parents were content with only giving me one first name and one surname.

Navid is a Persian name meaning “happy news.” When I was born my father couldn’t be present in the delivery room. Two years later we moved to Sweden. Two years earlier my parents got married, against the wishes of their families. But they did it anyway. That’s what I call happy news, especially for me.

The two girls in my class sat there patting my head all through Math class, Swedish, and Social Education. They were wondering;

- Don’t you feel sad about not having a name day of your own?

I said I thought the time when I was a kid and looked for white beanie at the mall that said Navid on it but couldn’t find one was a bummer. The girls pouted their lips and gave that classic look of pity. I asked them to stop what they were doing at once.

Modiri is also Persian. Modir means principal. I don’t know what the last “i” stands for, but I do know that my grandfather’s name was Davoudzadeh. His brothers were incredibly mean to him and stole his identification papers to buy land in his name. Then they sold the land and it put my grandfather deeply in debt. It got so bad he had to change his last name, so he changed it to Modiri.

One of the girls exclaimed:

-Evert! Evert can be your middle name. We’ll decide it right now. That way you’ll have a name day too!

I slammed my book together and left.

Today we celebrate all of us that don’t have a name day. To hell with adding Evert to our names to be celebrated. We rock.