This Is Us
My Ben Davis Problem
I’ve been fighting a losing battle with the world’s Ben Davises for decades.
If you Google me, my name auto-fills with ‘pants’. The first thing people want to know is whether I fit like ‘Dickies.’ I have an uncle named Dickie so there is a small chance this is a misguided fan with deep knowledge of my family and poor grammar. Sadly no — it’s likely because my name, first and last, is a clothing company.
On many, many occasions in my life, people have said, “I saw someone wearing your name on a shirt!” And I think — oh, this again? That’s nice. I appreciate that they call it my name. Their words imply that they’ve found someone who loves me so much they’ve put my name on a shirt. In reality, the Ben Davis clothing company has been around since 1935. So, really, someone should be looking at that shirt then coming to me to ask, “So, hey, when your parents were naming you, do you think that someone just walked by with a ‘Ben Davis’ shirt on and they thought, “Well — that sounds nice.”
No — actually, they named me the same way they named all of my brothers. My mom said a name, and, if my Dad couldn’t make fun of it, that’s what they went with. Clearly, this was not a research-driven exercise.
