Last Sunday morning, at the pool where I swim each day, my path took me toward a young child in the arms of his mother. When the woman smiled, I paused and asked the child’s name. “Truman,” the woman told me, a name that caught me by surprise because of my not having previously encountered anyone with that name. In reply, I muttered something about Harry S. Truman, the former president. She did not answer directly but looked accepting of my remark.

Later, having finished my swim, I walked past the same child. This time he was with his father so I paused and said how pleased I was to hear Truman’s name. I added something about the pleasure of hearing the name of a Democratic president, here in Cambridge where almost all of us favor the party Harry belonged to.

The father, however, promptly corrected me. His child was named, he said, not for Truman, the president, but rather for Truman Capote, the writer. Astonished, I could only express my enjoyment of the two major Hollywood films I had seen a few years ago about Capote.