Namesake

Greysen's name has a literary origin. The book is enititled Grayson by Lynne Cox. I fell in love with this book years ago and it has been sitting on my bookshelf since the love affair began. One day, while pregnant and cleaning the bookshelf, the book fell on my foot. My sister, CDoc, nearby noticed it too and I said, "This would be a great name for a boy and a good book for a namesake." I introduced the name and book to AJ and he fell in love with it too. And so the story goes...

It's a perfect Mother's Day Tale. It's about a woman who helped a baby gray whale find his mother after they were separated by fishing boats nearby. A woman was swimming off the coast of California and noticed a baby gray whale, 18 feet in length, following her. She realized that if she swam to shore, the whale would follow her and beach itself and die. So, she swam and swam and swam until, with the help of local fisherman and people on the wharf, they were able to reunite the mother and baby gray whale.

The story is riddled with tales of the bond of mother and baby, nature, connection with non-human things and the magic of it all. She believes she was able to speak to the baby whale to keep it with her so it wasn't lost permanently. And when reunited, she believes that the mother whale thanked her by rolling to the side to look her straight in the eye before she swam off with her baby in tow - looking like she had a smile on her large peaceful face.

We gave Greysen his own spelling and added the middle name Alexander from Andrew's Granddad, Papa and brother Dave. But when he can understand the magic of the story, we will tell him of the mother gray's son, Grayson, who followed a human for help and how they were able to speak to each other despite the language and species barrier.