Strider Rumi Bennett
Strider Rumi Bennett was born at 12:17pm on Thursday, 26 June 2003. That makes him a two-year-old now. He is a very happy boy. He likes jumping, playing trains and trucks. He enjoys watching Thomas, Dora, Bob El Constructor, Clifford, and Buster. But, really he is a freak for Thomas. At night, we put all the trains to sleep in the roundhouse. And, in the morning, we wake them up again for a long day of play.
Dad came by the day after our baby boy was born and took all of the above photographs.He
suggested that we name the boy Harry or Gershon after Dad's father. We were
also considering Fritz after my mother's father. Uncle Juergen suggested Benjamin
because it is a very crosscultural, easy-to-pronounce name. Imam
Feisal, the man who married us, suggested Sharif because the name serrendipitously
arose in my conversation with him. My brother-in-law, Mike, suggested Rens;
a Dutch name which would honor my mother's name, Renate. And pretty much every
single eighth-grader in Shekaiba's classes suggested Tony or Anthony (after
the singer, Tony Bennett). In the end, we decided on the last day at the hospital
to name him Strider Rumi Bennett. Strider was the name by which
we had been refering to him since we watched the first Lord
of the Rings movie together during Shekaiba's fourth month of pregnancy.
And, Rumi is the familiar name of the famous Afghan poet Mowlana
Jalaluddin Rumi who was born near where Shekaiba was born and whose poetry
is one of the spiritual underpinnings of the Sufi
path in Islam.
