When I was a kid, Peter was everywhere. It was a widespread boys’ name — unremarkable, ordinary, as common as peanut butter sandwiches in a school lunchbox. In the classroom roll call there were always a few of us, and at sport you could shout “Peter!” and three heads would turn.
My parents didn’t choose the name for any deep symbolic reason. Dad simply liked a work colleague named Peter and passed the name on. Practical. Straightforward. No family legacy or saint’s inheritance, just the kind of decision you make when you admire someone and want to honour that in your child.
Now, decades later, the scene has shifted. In my college community, I am the only Peter. There are more Alirezas than Peters. Sams gather like flocks. Alexs are everywhere. Even Simons have more company than me. What once was ordinary has become unusual.
It’s a strange thing to watch a name travel across time. At first, I blended in because there were too many of us. Now I stand out because there is only one. Common has become distinctive. What was once generic is now a rarity.
And then, of course, there is the meaning. Peter: “rock,” “stone.” Some colleagues have sometimes said I live up to it — a bedrock presence, steady and reliable. I like that, but that was never my goal. Rocks don’t clamour for attention, but they endure. They give footing to others. They last.
So perhaps there’s a quiet poetry in it after all. A name that began with no grand intention, borrowed from a work friendship, now carries with it the weight of time, the gift of rarity, and the call to be steady. Not a name shouted across the playground anymore, but a distinctive marker in a changing landscape.
Once common, now rare. A rock, still standing.
The Afterword 
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