"...Sometime ago, my wife Leonor brought home something that took me off balance for a moment..."
This illustrates the growing tendency of writers to omit as many commas as possible. I still favour the "rule" demanding that parenthetic phrases or words be marked off, thus eliminating possible confusion. In this case, I feel perfectly justified in asking, "How many wives do you have?" 
At first blush, Max and Reagan, it does look like I have more than one wife when I use a phrase that looks like a restrictive appositive in that sentence of mine, “Sometime ago,
my wife Leonor brought home something that took me off balance for a moment.” And I will also concede that I am indeed one of those writers who tend to omit as many commas as possible in their writing as a means of streamlining prose.
I must hasten to explain, however, that I really make it a point to use the phrase “my wife Leonor” without the commas not only as the better part of valor (for the record, Leonor is my one and only wife) but also in the interest of eliminating grammatical confusion. In fact, I consider “my wife Leonor” logically a single noun phrase, the words “my wife” and Leonor” being nouns so closely related that they might as well be just one term—if you get my drift. That being the case, the noun “Leonor” in my mind becomes a restrictive appositive, for which commas would naturally be superfluous in that phrase.
I actually had occasion to explain this usage of mine in one of a five-part column entitled “The Parenthesis and Its Uses” that appeared in
The Manila Times in January-February 2008. Let me quote the pertinent portions (I’ll do away with the obligatory quotation marks for clarity and simplicity):
In last week’s column, we discussed the nonrestrictive appositive phrase, a type of parenthetical that needs a pair of enclosing commas to set it off from the sentence. This time we will take up the restrictive appositive phrase, which doesn’t need those commas—as the appositive phrase “Pliny the Elder” doesn’t in this sentence: “The Roman scholar and encyclopedist
Pliny the Elder distinguished himself as a cavalry commander in Germany and later served as a well-respected procurator in Gaul, Africa, and Spain.”
We must keep in mind, though, that restrictive appositive phrases rarely get much longer than the three-word example given above. This is because extended phrases generally don’t function well as restrictive appositives; without the enclosing commas that set off nonrestrictive appositive phrases from a sentence, extended phrases used as restrictive appositives tend to make sentences convoluted and difficult to grasp.
Try reading this sentence, for instance: “The 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines is about a wacky cross-channel air race that dangled £10,000 in prize money to bring flyers from all over the world.” The restrictive appositive phrase here is the seven-word movie title “Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines,” which, if it weren’t italicized or placed within quotes in the sentence, would have made that sentence so difficult to grasp.
Indeed, what we will encounter more often is the restrictive appositive, which identifies a person, place, or thing more closely by name in just one to, say, three words, like “Regina” and “Jennifer” in this sentence: “My brother-in-law’s sister
Regina gave birth to a boy as their sister
Jennifer was driving her to the hospital.”
Here, the appositives “Regina” and “Jennifer” aren’t set off by commas because both are restrictive—they can’t be omitted from the sentence without affecting its basic meaning. They serve to make it clear that the speaker’s brother-in-law has at least two sisters—the one who gave birth and the other who drove her to the hospital. Without those restrictive appositives, in fact, the sentence becomes incoherent: “My brother-in-law’s sister gave birth to a boy as their sister was driving her to the hospital.”
But this question will obviously linger in our minds: What if we supply the enclosing commas and make those two appositives nonrestrictive instead, as in this construction: “My brother-in-law’s sister,
Regina, gave birth to a boy as their sister,
Jennifer, was driving her to the hospital”? The answer, as I will now explain, is a categorical “no.”
In its nonrestrictive form (with the enclosing commas), the appositive “Regina” implies that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister whose name happens to be Regina. However, the other nonrestrictive appositive, “Jennifer,” also implies that both the speaker’s brother-in-law and his sister Regina have only one sister whose name happens to be Jennifer.
This, of course, contradicts the earlier implication that the speaker’s brother-in-law has only one sister, Regina. Indeed, he has at least two sisters, Regina and Jennifer. This is why it isn’t advisable to put what should logically be a restrictive appositive into nonrestrictive form, for these two forms are neither grammatically and semantically equivalent nor interchangeable.
Even if there’s no possibility of an identity mix-up, the restrictive appositive form is often preferable to the nonrestrictive form if the appositive and the word it identifies are so closely related, as in this example: “
Her husband Alfredo is trying his luck as an overseas foreign worker.” Here, it can be argued that commas should set off “Alfredo” because this name isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence, thus making it a nonrestrictive appositive. However, the nouns “her husband” and “Alfredo” are so closely related that they can logically be considered a single noun phrase, “her husband Alfredo.” The commas then become superfluous, making “Alfredo” a restrictive appositive.
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The grammar of that sentence, I must say, is precisely the same as that of my sentence that's in question here.
