Her name was Maria, with a twist on the r that I tried and failed to imitate when I said it back to her. She smiled at me anyway, eyes lingering on my name tag. “And you…?”

I try to remember to wear the thing every day, but even when I don’t it’s not an uncommon question. My parents spelled my name the way it is on the optimistic but ultimately flawed assumption that strangers would find it easier to sight-read than the more traditional “Anneke.” Most people swing for the phonetic and miss, except for those who glance at its silhouette and typoglecmize their way to “Amanda.”

“It’s Annaka,” I tell Maria, then tack on my usual pronunciation guide: “It’s like Monica, but chop the m off the front.”

Maria and I are killing time while we wait for the least sketchy YouTube-to-MP4 converter I could find to finish dumping a three-hour complication of meditative ambiance onto her flash drive. We started the interaction (after I rescued the skittish teenager that she’d originally waylaid for tech help) with Maria telling me that she was “taking an online course” but didn’t have any internet at home, so could I please teach her how to download YouTube videos? I didn’t think that I could, at least not in a way that would translate into replicable success, but plunged on anyway, in defiance of common sense and probably the YouTube terms of service.

Upon hearing my name said aloud, Maria’s eyes light. She (with some difficulty) maneuvers through the YouTube interface again, this time pulling up a video entitled “ANA BEKOACH ENGLISH LYRICS HEBREW” and gesturing at the screen, where stock video of Haredi Jews is now playing, stamped overtop with bilingual lyrics in bold type.

“It’s this,” Maria says. “Your name is… like this. Sacred.” She’s come up against the language barrier and shakes her head once, before looking up back at me with holy certainty. “You have no idea who you are,” she declares.

This is, for those of you keeping track at home, the second time that a middle-aged library patron doing dodgy work on the public computers has given me unsolicited mystic insights based on my nomenclature. (The cynic can’t help but wonder if the hundreds of thousands of other people in the world named some variation of “Ann” are similarly blessed.)

But twice is coincidence, and unlike Judy’s Sacred Egg of Resputin, the Ana b’Koach is a real thing, if one that no one can quite seem to agree on how to Anglicize the spelling of. It is a liturgical poem dating back to the Middle Ages and steeped in centuries of Jewish religious practice and numerology that I am far too ignorant to explain or extrapolate from here. It is also, especially to those (like myself) particularly susceptible to a good chant, extremely beautiful.

And standing there—one half of a boxy pair of headphones pressed to my ear for politeness, listening to a clear-voiced woman sing words that have been sung for hundreds of years while a stranger stares at me with total conviction of my specialness—I felt a flash of understanding, no longer than a second. Once it passed, all I could think was, That must be what it’s like to believe in TV psychics.

Which I don’t, and likewise don’t believe that my name is sacred to anyone, including believers in Kabbalah, save the one currently ripping the MP4 out of a video claiming that the alpha waves contained therein cure insomnia (three hours).

There are indeed days when I hardly know who I am, but at least I also know how to muddle through them. And until next year, when a Latter Day Saint finds a way to cross reference the cosmology of my name against the first letter of each paragraph in the Pearl of Great Price, that’ll have to do.

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