So Flick and I were driving down North Roosevelt last week. At the back end of a trek to Miami, we’d about run out of conversation when I asked: “Once they build that new Publix store in Searstown, do we still call it ‘Old Publix’?”

“What the actual (expletive deleted),” I could hear her thinking in the silence. We reached for the cigarettes — sometimes you need a smoke break to ponder — and then spent the last mile into town sorting the new Old Publix from the old New Publix, which is getting its own rebuild, so it guess it will be the New New Publix.

Welcome to my brain chasing squirrels and shiny balls rather than weightier topics, like affordable housing and healthcare. But seriously, what ARE we going to call those two stores? When asked where one grocery-shops in Key West (assuming the answer isn’t Winn-Dixie or Fausto’s), the shorthand answer is either Old Publix or New Publix. And we all know which location we’re talking about. Even the folks who still call New Publix Albertson’s, which it was until July 2012.

Oh sure, you can call them Searstown Publix or Key Plaza Publix. But you might have to clue newcomers in because Searstown is now Searsless, and locals call Key Plaza Kmart Plaza even though its Kmart is long gone. You could call them 500 (Old Publix) or 1445 (New Publix), which is how their corporate owner names them. Publix has been using numbers for its stores since the first one opened in 1930. The lower the number, the longer the store has been in that location.

When this came up later with a friend, he said, “Thank you for not mentioning the thing that made me shudder when I read it: renaming Searstown as Conch RePublix Plaza.”

Is it Publix or Publices if there are two of them?

Renaming stuff is hard. Just ask the U.S. president who’s wrangling — so far unsuccessfully — to paste his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Not to mention rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario to Lake America and floating the ideas of New Mexico becoming New America and the Strait of Hormuz morphing into Trump Strait. (Better for him than Trump Crooked, I guess, but I digress.)

You can stick up all the signs you want, even change U.S. maps, and folks are still going to call it the way they learned it.

Take that quarter-mile concrete pier at the end of Key West’s White Street. Rebranded in June 2016 as the Edward B. Knight Pier in honor of the local developer and philanthropist, that ode to Brutalist architecture, which opened in 1960, remains the White Street Pier. Try as hard as they might, the marketing folks just can’t make that Knight Pier thing stick for locals. Humans ain’t much fond of changing up words just for the heck of it.

It’s still the Cow Key Bridge, no disrespect to its newish name and big sign: The Cheryl H. Cates Memorial Bridge. It’s still the 90-mile Overseas Heritage Trail, despite the recent huge signs along U.S. 1 renaming the Big Pine and Bahia Honda segments the Spotswood Heritage Trail. Dare I mention that it’s still A1A despite its renaming to Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway?

Heck, you can’t even change your own name and expect it to go smoothly. The kids from high school are still gonna call you that unflattering nickname despite the passage of a half century. Not to mention you’ll need official documents to prove every iteration of your name over the decades.

Woe to any woman who followed custom and changed her last name to match her husband’s. Divorces along the way? Bring more paperwork. Over the years I’ve gone from Linda Joanne Grist to Linda Grist Crewe to Linda Grist Cunningham with riffs on all of them for bylines and mortgage docs. Trust me when I say I keep a lot of official papers in the safe deposit box.

Back to Publix. Flick and I ditched Searstown Publix and Key Plaza Publix. Too long, too hard to say. We spent no time on 500 and 1445. I mean, seriously, who’s gonna call a grocery store by its number? Adding new-old modifiers gets totally out of hand. We landed on Old Publix and New Publix, same as before. Even though Old Publix will be New Publix before New Publix becomes New Publix. Plus, once the New New Publix is built, the other one will be — obviously — Old Publix. Got it?