By Any Other Name
Our first dog when I was a very small child was named Whiskey. I have no recollection of why. Our next dog was given the name Brandy by my father. He was a mutt, and as my father explained, we didn't know what brand-he was. Much later we had a Dachshund that got the name Tati because she arrived at our house the same day that Jacques Tati came to visit. I imagine he was charmed. When I got my first dog on my own, after leaving college and moving into my own apartment, I was in a quandry. For several days I kept thinking up what I thought were increasingly better names. This was compounded by the fact that my friends kept calling up with what seemed like equally acceptable names. Finally, after about two weeks when the poor dog was nameless I decided it was time to call it quits. The light went on, and Quits he became. I was staying with someone once in Johannesburg who had two labs named Black Dog and Other Black Dog. "Which one is Black Dog?" I asked him. "Whichever one comes first when I call," he answered.
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:37 AM
5 Comments:
Great essay John!(And cartoon too!) When I was a teen I befriended a beautiful German Shepherd on my way home from school. And, much to my cat-loving mother's horror, the dog followed me to the doorstep. My mother graced him with his first name, "Go Home!" and he, delighted in having found a perfectly good home obeyed her commands and charmed her with his doggy grin. Over the year he acquired the name "Tut" for he had the most beautiful Egyptian eyelinered eyes...
hahaha... great stories both! (and funny cartoon!) I never had a pet puppy that didn't meet with a tragid end... one with "wheel's" disease and the other climbing the walls with distemper (despite having had the shots)... so it was then I decided to graduate to cats... with whom I had some measure of success. Pets bring such joy and such heartbreak... but you gotta love em!
um... that would be tragic... not tragid (although it does have a nice ring to it! LOL)
Mary, your dog sounds wonderful. Once had a cat named "she who must be obeyed; (shades of Rumpole), but since she never came when called, refused to called for her in public thus avoiding embarrassment on both sides.
John will recall that once upon a time in Italy dogs, whom the church claimed had no souls, could not be given Christian names, or, to be more precise, Italian names. Although you never heard anyone call out for Maria or Sandro, there were countless Bobis (Bobbys), Lazys (Lassies) and other Anglo-Saxon sounding animals wandering the streets of Italia. In Positano I was given a dog named Lolita who lived up to her name.
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