Lactose Intolerant

I liked my name just fine

until the day in fourth grade

when I discovered

that it meant “wild cow”

in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

The book was a thick tome

with golden-edged pages

that was stuffed

with an unimaginable

quantity of words,

and it sat on a wooden podium

in the back of the classroom

with its covers

spread open invitingly.

This new edition

contained every word

in the English language,

including proper nouns,

names and their origins.

“Leah” was at the

upper-right-hand corner

of the 682nd page,

so its presence

was impossible to miss.

One of my sharp-eyed classmates

spotted it one day,

during an odious class assignment

which involved

looking up obscure words

while thumbing through

the dictionary's heavy pages,

and then painstakingly

copying definitions onto pieces

of lined notebook paper.

Discovering that my name

had a bovine connotation

was considerably more interesting

than homework,

and this fascination

blossomed into a terrible flower,

until my arrivals at school

in the mornings

were always welcomed

by ritual choruses of mooing

that only ceased

when the teachers yelled

for silence.

My classmates asked what flavor

of milk I was giving,

and sometimes I played along,

said plain or chocolate,

or no, I wasn't giving milk

because I wasn't actually a cow.

Finally, I transferred

to another school

where they didn't

use Webster's dictionary

and the mooing ceased-

but it was years

before I learned to like cows,

or could even

hear the word “cow”

without thinking of my name.