Me and My Shadow

Naming your kid after the coolest archangel in the firmament was quite the thing in 1957, the year of Sputnik and the Edsel and one of many in which Michael (in Hebrew, literally, “one who is like God”) made the most-popular-monikers-for-baby-boys list.

Couple Michael to the ubiquitous Walker (go ahead and say it: Texas Ranger) and, brother, you’ve got company. There are seven Michael Walkers (righteous, dudes!) listed in the Greater Los Angeles White Pages, well shy of the 28 John Smiths but a presence--frankly biblical, vaguely Anglo-Saxon--to be reckoned with.

Which got me thinking: What about all the other Michael Walkers in the state? The country? Hell, the world?

So it was I typed my first and last names into a World Wide Web search engine--software that trawls the Internet looking for matching words--and gasped as my trusty Mac coughed up 41,507 “relevant documents” about Michael Walker. (When Walter Cronkite tried this stunt last year he was aghast to find a crank Web page, “Walter Cronkite Spit in My Food,” that purported the Most Trusted Man in America had drunkenly defiled a couple’s dessert at a Moroccan restaurant at Disney World; Cronkite made noises about suing and the author of the page apologized and admitted he’d made the whole thing up.)

Some of the “hits” in my search weren’t: a farm-machinery leasing company in West Virginia with Walker in its title and a parts manager named Mike, for example. But I also found plenty of genuine Michael Walkers--from New Zealand to NATO’s occupying forces in Bosnia--who had entire Web pages devoted to their own bad selves. (The noteworthy are arrayed here.) And all I can say is: Fellas, you rule.

Finding my fellow Michaels Walker was like stumbling into a parallel universe where the lives you could have (should have?) lived go streaming by at 28,000 bps. So although I tubed an advanced degree in English lit to work for the alternative press, the many Michael Walkers, PhD, I turned up clearly had stayed the course and made their--our--moms proud. Where my only brush with the martial arts was watching Carl Douglas perform “Kung Fu Fighting” on ABC’s “In Concert,” Michael Walker, second-degree black belt, is out there giving taekwondo a good name. And while I’ve written my share of mortifying pop-cultural trash, I can’t begin to match the elan with which the art is practiced by Faye Resnick collaborator and National Enquirer legend Mike Walker.

Gentlemen--Michael Walkers everywhere--salute!