When my co-workers celebrated my birthday the other week, a smile came across my face when I saw the envelope with my birthday card. It simply read: “Shea.”

That was one of the best things that could have happened. For as long as I can remember, I have either attracted nicknames or been called by my last name instead of my first.

I don’t get that much anymore. First of all, I am moving into that territory where I am known as “Mr. Shea” or “Bridget’s Dad.” That’s pretty disheartening.

Secondly, no one I grew up with or knew from college lives around here. That’s where most of my nicknames came from. I honestly think I knew people in college who didn’t know my first name.

Somehow in college, people started to call me “monster.” I think it came from wrestling practice, but I’m not really sure. It stuck and took on a number of variations – monster o’shea was perhaps my favorite.

Then there were the plays on words – clishea, ricoshea, twoshea. My friend Ross always seemed to come up with a new one each time we hung out.

And because of the many lectures my fraternity received about the dangers of hazing, people started calling me Sheazing.

But the old standard with simply “Shea.”

A couple of days before I graduated from college, I took a couple of my siblings out to one of my favorite watering holes for a couple of beers. Some of my best friends were there and Carolyn came over to introduce herself to my family.

“Hi, Brian!”

I just gave her this quizzical look. I don’t think I had heard her call me that since we met during our freshman year. For four years, I was “Shea” and she was “Ho,” a derivation of her last name.

Her boyfriend’s brother came to visit us once at school and couldn’t get over the fact that everyone called her “Ho.” That bothered him for some reason.

But that was the way things went. I hung out with Egg, TR and Bud, not Mr. Edgerton, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Dwyer. The yearly portrait for my fraternity had some of the funniest nicknames under some of the pictures.

People I know through the Internet call me “monster” because I use that as a username on some Web sites, but that’s pretty much where it ends these days. And those people only pick up on it because I use the nickname, not because they came up with it.

My wife doesn’t even shorten my first name. She doesn’t like nicknames very much.

In fact, when we selected baby names, one of the rules was that it could not be easily shortened into a nickname. Naturally, some of my family has started to call her “Bridge,” but we’ll all survive.

I know that, as I grow up, having a nickname might sound silly to some people, but I like it. One of my favorite experiences reading the newspaper is seeing nicknames in the obituaries. I try to think of how that creative name came to be.

When I looked at my last name on the card a few weeks ago, I felt like I hadn’t added a year to my age. I felt younger, more vital.

I felt like a monster again.