I don’t “channel” people, but if I did, I would tell you Andy Rooney told me to write this essay. I heard his voice in my head, and it stayed with me until I finished. But who am I to say it sounds like him?

If I do anything heroic before I die, which I don’t expect will happen, please don’t name a section of highway after me. I don’t want to be associated with car accidents. Name a park after me, or a clear rocky river where people kayak. But not a river that floods people out. I wouldn’t mind my name on a road sign in the country lined with old elms and oaks with gnarly locust trees. But not one where people crack up.

In New York City, you have the Jackie Robinson Parkway. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t think Jackie was a great ball player and a fine man. But about the only time I hear his name now is on my commute in the New York area. Often the radio announcer says, “Accident on the Jackie Robinson Parkway.” I’d rather see his name on a park. How about the Jackie Robinson section of Central Park?

Then there’s the Hutchinson Parkway in Westchester County, New York. If you ask a kid, I doubt he’d know who Anne Hutchinson was. But he could tell you there’s a lot of accidents on her road. Anne got famous in the 1600s because she got herself educated and told the Puritans to turn the heat down a few notches on their religion. I wonder if the Puritans would say they’re not surprised there are many accidents on her road.

I guess Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did well. When I think of their memorials, I hear roaring jet engines and see happy people boarding planes for vacation. Plane accidents are rare, so their names are virtually never associated with transportation deaths.

Who wants President Dwight Eisenhower’s name associated when they announce the tally of deaths each year on the Eisenhower Interstate System? I see online there’s a Dwight David Eisenhower airport in Wichita, Kansas. How about IKE on something glorious and safe, but more than just a little Midwest airport? That’s just not enough for that powerful man with that powerful-sounding name. After all, he’s the general who stopped the Nazis, and he was one of Norman Rockwell’s favorite models because he was a genuine man.

Naming hospitals and hospital wings after people seems nice, but the brass most always seem to post the name of their biggest donors. Few people complain because the gifts are so honorable. I’ll never have my name on one of these, but that’s okay. I guess the only way I’ll get something named after me is if I buy a parcel of land in the country and pay a contractor to carve out a brief stretch of country road. I’d lay down and tamp the gravel myself, hammer down a post and bolt on a sign on it bearing my name. I don’t know how good I’d feel because it would be me praising myself. But please folks, if I do that, drive carefully by my name. People in the country remember those crashes for a long time.

BTW, don’t you think our country ought to do something better for Jackie?