In 1st grade, our class built a robot that could quiz you. On its chest, it had a row of questions and a row of the answers. If you touched its right arm to a question and its left arm to the correct answer, it would light up. (The secret was that there was a wire between the matching questions and answers that would complete a circuit!).

That year, I went to Bellingham, WA for my cousin Matt’s Bar Mitzvah. I was playing with my other cousin Daniel and his friend Robby. I remember commenting that our robot shared his name.

Actually, I recall the exact phrase (though it’s a bit embarrassing to recount verbatim): “You think my name is weird? Your name is the name of our class robot.”