Being a Scharetg, Part 1

I’ve spent my entire life watching people go cross-eyed when they see my last name. During roll call on the first day of school, when the teacher rattled off name after name, I was the kid that waited for the awkward silence. I would raise my hand while the teacher rolled her tongue, smacked her lips, and stuttered blindly over the letters on the class sheet. When I was the kicker on my high school football team, my name would be in the box score in the Saturday paper for every extra point I had kicked on Friday night. The editor, completely baffled by such an arrangement of letters, would simply try a new variation every time my name was written, hoping that at least one would be correct—it never was. I added it to the dictionary of the spell check feature on my computer, but there’s still a squiggly red line beneath it every time it’s typed. I have heard every possible pronunciation. The only people that can get it right the first time are other Scharetg’s, and they are my cousins. “The G is silent,” is something you learn to say in your sleep. I’ve even watched my best friends pause contemplatively when they write it down. I think half the emails that have ever been sent to me are sitting in some sad forgotten box in cyber space.

Growing up as a Scharetg, you face two possible options. You grow tired of being butchered and you reject the name, or you find solidarity in the oddness of who you are and become hopelessly proud to be a Scharetg. I remember when I was first confronted with the choice. It was in one of those early day class rooms with the tiny chairs and the tiny desks. The teacher said, “Richards, Rooney, Ryan, Sanders...oh, ah…” I stood up and thrust my tiny hand into the sky. “Scharetg!” I belted out with an emphatic smile. It would take thirty more attempts with that teacher, but at least I tried.

I have a special admiration for those who take the name by choice. My mom is perhaps the greatest ambassador of all. She was a Gray before she was married. She didn’t understand the struggles that lied ahead. I have such vivid memories of standing behind her at the video store, at least once a week, listening to her spell our name to the same clerk behind the counter. “S-C-H…A-R…E-T-G.” I could time his sigh and then the scribbling of his pen. “One more time,” he would say. My mom is so proud of her name. Maybe she likes being different, maybe she is a glutton for punishment, but mostly I think she just loves my dad. I see the same passion in Jeannie.

My name has taken on new meaning in the last year. My identity as a Scharetg has evolved greatly through new discoveries. Nestled in the remote Domleschg Valley of the Swiss Alps, in a village of four hundred people, is a house with a cellar that contained secrets of the very meaning of being a Scharetg.