My Name Is: DiVoran

My Take

DiVoran Lites

For most of my life, I’ve been explaining how I got my name. This is how it happened: My mother, Dora, and my father, Ivan, lived in Lovelock, Nevada where Daddy worked as a meat cutter for Safeway, and Mother worked at a laundry mostly patronized by miners.

One morning toward the end of her pregnancy she got up with so much energy, she thought she’d clean the coal-burning cook stove in the kitchen before she went to work.

While she cleaned she was thinking about her friend Walkama, who worked there too. Walkama had had a baby earlier. Her labor started while she was at work. I don’t know how her husband knew to come and get her, but he took her home, then she had the baby. Maybe some of the tribe’s women were with her, and in the same day, her husband brought her back. Dora had never heard of anything like that, and she knew she was going to have a very different experience with her child’s birth.

About the time Dora was ready to put the stove back together, her labor started. Ivan came home for lunch and walked Dora to the hospital a short distance away. Her labor commenced in earnest and by 4:00 P. M. I had arrived. She always said, “Just in time for tea.”

In those days white women were held at the hospital for two weeks to recuperate from the ordeal of having a baby. Given Dora’s enjoyment of work of all kinds, she had a long and probably boring time there. One startling thing happened though: on Halloween night three days after I was born, the radio program, “The War of the Worlds,” scared people half to death all over America.

The radio program was presented as a newscast about something that was happening right then. People all over America were scared out of their wits, including Dora. It was one of my birth stories.

The War of the Worlds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xs0K4ApWl4g

The story about my name went like this: toward the end of the two weeks, the nurse came into our room and told Mother and Daddy that they had to name me or they couldn’t have a birth certificate nor could Mother and baby go home. Now,this is what I think had happened. Daddy really wanted that boy and they must have had boy names picked out, but no names for girls. When the nurse saw that they were flummoxed, she suggested they put their two names together. They worked on it on a scrap of paper and finally came up with DiVoran, with two capitals, one from each of their names.

We left the hospital the day the birth certificate was issued. When we got home, Daddy had the stove all put together clean and shiny. The next day, Mother took me to work in a light-weight baby cot and Walkama, perhaps, carried her baby in a cradle-board on her back as they worked.

I was surprised and pleased to learn in later years that I was born on the Lovelock Paiute Indian Reservation where the town was located.

DiVoran has been writing for most of her life. Her first attempt at a story was when she was seven years old and her mother got a new typewriter. DiVoran got to use it and when her dad saw her writing he asked what she was writing about. DiVoran answered that she was writing the story of her life. Her dad’s only comment was, “Well, it’s going to be a very short story.” After most of a lifetime of writing and helping other writers, DiVoran finally launched her own dream which was to write a novel of her own. She now has her Florida Springs trilogy and her novel, a Christian Western Romance, Go West available on Amazon. When speaking about her road to publication, she gives thanks to the Lord for all the people who helped her grow and learn.  She says, “I could never have done it by myself, but when I got going everything fell beautifully into place, and I was glad I had started on my dream.”

Tags: Memories