It’s “Title Season.” Well, everything has a season. So why not titles?

Let me explain. During these weeks, I’m wrestling with the need to submit many titles for upcoming programs, mostly talks at educational conferences or lectures for future Smithsonian Journeys tours.

Now, perhaps you have a genius for titles. I don’t. It’s hard to give a title to a presentation that hasn’t been written yet. The content will get settled as the event draws closer, of course, but sometimes only a few days before.

Plus it’s hard to predict what’s going to be on my mind months into the future. What will seem interesting to an audience by the time the event arrives? What buzz words and prominent themes might be circulating eleven months from now?

Titles have to be descriptive, yet fit into narrow columns of brochures and programs. They have to be serious, yet enticing. Specific, yet welcoming. It’s good if they can be humorous, but not too humorous. If you’ve configured a lot of titles, you already know the challenge.

I agonize over titles. Actually, it’s a kind of “phobia” for me.

One of my most embarrassing memories concerned a title. I was in the middle of writing my dissertation. I’d flown from Germany to work intensely for a few days with my advisor at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was an eminent scholar and indescribably kind. Without him, I’d still be writing Chapter One of the dissertation.

Well, repeatedly he had asked for my title. I didn’t have it yet. His wife, also a tremendous scholar, overheard me offering my excuses. At that time, personal computers were fairly new, but both of them were pros at technology.

She looked up at me and said something like, “If you don’t get him a title by your next meeting, I’m going to throw your keywords into the computer and generate a title!”

The idea horrified me. Today, it might seem cool, but believe me, it wasn’t cool then. The very idea of failing in my advisor’s eyes and having to ask a machine to create a title for the very work that would define my academic career, well, it was embarrassing, at the very least.

So, that night I went out with friends. I passed out pens and napkins. I spouted out the ideas and terms that characterized my dissertation and begged them to help me. It was hilarious, but I was worried behind the laughter. My friends got bored with it, but somehow we didn’t leave the restaurant until they had forced me to craft a title on my napkin.

I still have the napkin. And looking at it now and again, I recall how I hoped and prayed that I’d never need to come up with titles again.

Unfortunately, that has not been the case, although I no longer assemble a group of friends to help me. (I do ask my husband.) But seriously: had I known that evening just how many hundreds, maybe thousands, of titles I’d need in the ensuing years, I might have let my head sink into the cheeseburger and stay there.

So, writing this blog post has given me a moment’s break from working on a brutal set of titles. I need them by today’s end. Will the break work its magic? Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Isn’t that how life goes, though? We grandly plow through big things, whatever they be, and then get stuck repeatedly on what seems small. Maybe the small things aren’t so small. Sometimes the small thing is the hardest thing. Threading a needle, without which one cannot sew. Finding the car keys, without which one cannot begin a trip (surely I’m not the only one with this problem). Latching a gate, without which the entire herd will flee away.

Okay, I’m getting carried away. But still, next year, at Title Season, I might put out a call on my Professor Carol Facebook page and ask for help! Meanwhile, I’m sure you’re dying to know the scintillating, brilliant title of my dissertation. Are you ready?

The First Russian Patriotic Oratorio: “Minin I Pozharskii, or the Freeing of Moscow” (1813).

Breathtaking, yes? Okay, I hear you saying, what was so hard about finding that title? Only if you share my struggle with titles will you have the least bit of sympathy for me. Maybe I should close by singing a verse of “That’s What Friends Are For.”