If you asked them now, and if they were feeling honest, it’s likely that anyone alive during it would admit that the event (or The Naming, as it came to be called) was not that alarming at its start.
    We’ve all been there: you’re driving and for some reason you can’t get your radio going. Your phone doesn’t have service. “Just one of those glitches.” You keep driving until it comes back. Only, when it happened, it didn’t come back. Just static. White noise. And we kept listening to it. It’s comforting in the background of daily life. You know, DeLillo and all that. I’m not sure what the DJs at the radio stations thought necessarily, but I’ve been driving midnights and had the DJ ask the lonely rhetorical question: is anyone out there? I answer out of habit. 
    But then, it stopped being static just as suddenly as it had started. 
    “Virginia,” a voice said. As human as my IPhone’s GPS. As robotic as a rote goodbye. Who can say who said it? The tonal scale was in the middle space: female? Male? Young? Old? I was driving freight up to Maine. I was in Massachusetts about that time. I’d say about 6:30. Because of this, I didn’t think it had to do with the geography of the U.S. although I’ve learned since then that others did. The news had it by that time you see, so by five in the evening the following day everyone in Virginia was afraid. West Virginians too – proximity but also fear that perhaps we hadn’t heard the “West” piece of it. There were runs on grocery stores, gas stations, sporting goods shops, the usual. By the time my delivery was over and I was back at home (my mom’s place in New Hampshire) there was breaking news about the static. Was it getting louder? Was there more to be heard inside of it? Were we just not listening hard enough?
    The days went and the media let us know by the reduced font size, and change from red to blue in the scrolling ticker that Virginians and West Virginians alike could rest easy.
    There was speculation. It wasn’t a very popular name, so maybe it was directed to the rare Virginias in the world. Some started going by Ginny, or abandoned it for middle names entirely. Virginia Woolf scholars gained new fame and fortune. I heard a “Virginia Dare cult” began and picked up speed – their main tenet was a belief that it was an “America-targeted Reaching Out from Beyond” – although it is widely understood that The Naming was a global one-time-only event.
    At the time, I thought maybe I was picking up on a baby monitor. Virginia, the mother said, gently, putting the baby down. Rocking her maybe. A voice speaking just for one person, but reaching me too. Wires don’t cross anymore in this wireless world, but maybe ours passed through each other in that moment; passed that particular moment together.