In the mornings, when I go to exercise (my new gig: getting up a half hour early, cycle, exercise, cycle home, shower and get on with the day; supposedly freeing up time in the evenings which will be spent in the valuable pursuit of projects, housecleaning, quality time with friends and dog, and so forth. In practice, to date it has yielded two nights of exceedingly good cookies (the verdict on tonight?s chocolate chip oatmeal cookies: exceptional!), a whole lot of frittered time on games and wandering around, and other time-wasting activities too frivolous to even be dignified with an official designation such as fritter), there is a constant group of senior citizens going through their geriatric paces.

What they are doing up before seven am is entirely beyond me, as my vision of retirement has me going to bed at 2am and not getting up before 8:30 every morning. Is it not a universal desire to dream of a day when you do not have to get up and haul yourself into work? When you can lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for as long as you want? Is fantasizing about vacation not just a temporizing to keep the dream of retirement sloth tangible?

Yet here they are, pumping iron and chatting with each other. And they are chatty. They know each other?s names and histories. They cluster in groups of two to four and quiz to find out the latest news in each of their lives. The old people are friendly and legitimately interested in what is happening to each other.

They are one well-connected group, and in a way that I do not notice among any other age band. Sure, there are isolated clusters of two or three middle-aged guys who know each other and chat. And there are flirting guys trading slang-ridden observations on popular music and culture with the pretty girls on staff (conversations which amaze me, they are so far removed from any interchange that I could even pretend to engage in). But no community in the sense of that shared by the morning old people, greeting each other by name.

Which opened up a whole other conversation about how stingy we are with our names. We guard them as if they are major keys to our lives, as if anyone who has them could wield some unspecified but unsavory power over us.

The guy at the gym, asking if I am done with the machine ? I do not know his name and it never occurs to me that I should, or that he should know mine. Waiters give out their names all the time, but we rarely give them our names in return; we do not want a connection, we just want a handle to grab his attention should we need more Coke.

When I have been flying and struck up a conversation with a seatmate, we will be twenty minutes in before we get around to that awkward back-tracking moment of ?by the way, my name is...?. How nuts is that? I might know where you live and whom you work for and if you are married and how many kids you have, but I do not know your name?

We are very jealous of our anonymous space. We do not introduce ourselves to the people we are standing in line at the grocery store with. And when the checkout clerk makes unauthorized use of our name after reading it off the debit card, we cannot help but be a little annoyed at the liberty.

Are we missing out on something important? Are we missing something enriching by skipping all the opportunities to make lots of little connections with people? Is there a wider community that we are isolating ourselves from because we do not want to share our name?

That it all hinges on something as tiny as your name is just nuts to me. Who cares who knows my name? ?Hello, I am Scott Allen McJannet.? What could you possibly say that I have lost control of there? [Wizard of Earthsea comment here, for those in the know.] It is just an identifying series of syllables, not a toolkit for identity theft or anything.

Of course, for whatever it is worth, since pointing this out to myself a week or two ago, I find that I am still not making any greater use of my name. In point of fact, I do really like cruising around in a bubble of anonymity and being spared the responsibility of connections with other people and having to take on even the brief responsibility of thinking about them, their happiness and how to give them a worthwhile moment from our intersection.