Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

An earthly memorial seems a fitting tribute

I see San Jose has had an asteroid named after it. That's nice, as long as it doesn't strike the Earth. I suppose having an asteroid named after you is something. Most of the time astronomers name things after Greek gods or goddesses or their discoverers. Hale-Bopp, for instance, got named after the astronomers who found it. Halley's comet also received its name from the astronomer who first tracked it.

The comet, of course, doesn't care who it is named after. Nor, I suppose, does the asteroid in question. But it does seem to me to point to a dangerous trend. Saratoga, for example, may well want an asteroid named after it, too. After all, it dimmed its lights to help out Lick Observatory, just as San Jose did. We're soon likely to have a sky filled with unearthly bodies named for earthly habitations.

The practice also brings into question the whole idea of naming natural objects for human or earthly things. Take, as an example, Mt. Everest, named for a British surveyor who probably was not aware it was the highest mountain on Earth.

Mt. McKinley, now almost as frequently called as Denali, its Native American name, raises the issue of naming things as memorials. I don't suppose anyone has done a survey to find out how many Martin Luther King Jr. ways, streets, boulevards and avenues there are, or how many grammar schools are named for the late president John F. Kennedy. But for a while after their deaths it seemed as if every school or street around was being memorialized.

Memorials in one form or another seem the most popular naming event. It's a way of honoring a contribution to life, unfortunately after the particular individual is gone and won't know about it. But it happens all the time. There is, of course, the possibility that something can be named for someone while they're still alive.

San Francisco did that for the late newspaper columnist Herb Caen. Bagdad by the Bay, as he used to call it, named an "esplanade" for him near The Embarcadero. Nice gesture, even though it was made in anticipation of his approaching demise from cancer. But San Francisco is not the only place to honor the living.

In Santa Clara County naming things for people even before their deaths was popular for a while. San Jose City Councilmembers had an orgy of naming parks after themselves before they went out of office, and the Santa Clara City Council named streets after living councilmembers while they were still not only alive but on the council.

San Jose even named a park after the wife of a then living city manager, but the city never got around to naming anything after him. Not even a street.

All this has led me to wonder what I could name after myself. I thought about it long and hard.

Not a street or a school, surely. For one thing, my name is so hard to spell that it would be a civic burden, not a boon. For another, a close examination of my civic record shows that while I have not missed an election in a long time, I haven't done much of anything else to make my stay in this valley memorable.

And frankly, I can't see that having an asteroid or a peak on the moon or Mars is much of an honor. Who's going to know it's there but the astronomers? And who among them would care, anyway?

But it would be nice to have some kind of a memorial, something named after me so that when I have passed on people will look at it and say, although probably rather vaguely, "Oh, yeah, Heintze ... he was ... how do you spell it?... say that again ..."

So after much casting about--well, deliberation of maybe 15 minutes or so--I think I have finally found the thing.

It's a birdbath. It sits in our garden. It's made of cement. It's round and it only has water in it when it rains--which these days is fairly frequently. When it does have water in it, the birds come and wash. Sometimes they come even when there isn't water in it.

They perch on the edges and have little chats with one another.

That's memorial enough for me.

Of course, the birds won't know it, but heck, they don't know whether they're flying over John F. Kennedy School or Martin Luther King Jr. Way either.

I promise I'll mount a brass plaque on it somewhere so you'll know it's mine. Don't throw any coins in it, though. I need bigger contributions.

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