By any other name would smell as sweet."
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I took Dog to my daughter’s softball game the other day. When the game was over, Savannah rushed out of the dugout to greet him with an exuberant, “Hi, Dog!” while furiously petting his furry, little head. Then I looked at him and said, “Time to go, Dog!”
And one of the girls on the team looked at us as if we were a little bit crooked in the head and said, incredulously, “Did you name your dog ‘Dog’?”
Savannah and I just looked at each other, and then at Dog—a secret, crazy joke between us--and started laughing.
Actually, Dog’s official, pedigreed name is “Delrio’s California Sunshine of Los Perritos,”
but that’s a cumbersome moniker to call out when you want him to hurry up and jump off the couch
or quit chewing on your shoe.When we first got Dog, we spent many days brainstorming the perfect name for him.
We considered Simba (because he looked a little like a white lion), Piddle (because he did a lot of that the first couple of weeks), and Max (because, like Jacob and Emily, that's a popular name these days.)
After about two weeks, with no clear winner--lazy, procrastinating, unimaginative family that we are—we took the path of least resistance and decided to keep the name that his breeder, Grandma Claudie, gave him, “Sunny.” After all, he does have sunny little personality.
But, in our family, official names don’t mean much.
My husband and I refer to each other almost exclusively as “Honey-Pie” and “Spoon.” We only use “Kathy” and “Jeff” when we are either angry or really serious, which is not often.
These days we call Savannah, “Tock,” which began with her little brother calling her “Sissy,” which, because of toddler pronunciation issues, morphed into “Ticky,” then to “Tick-Tock,” and finally to “Tock.” I feel a little silly writing this little family version etymology. (For the record, at various times, she has also answered to “Extra” for “extra special,” “Triple-chocolate” for her bittersweet, non-vanilla personality, and “pumpkin,” just because.)
We lovingly refer to Carson as “Bean” or “Super Bean,” which comes from “Cocoa Bean” (the origin of which is debatable: His sister suggests that it was because his head was so large and round, which I don’t think was meant to be a compliment and is perhaps due to her newly adolescent hormonal state, and that’s all I’m saying about that. My husband seems to remember making up a song, “Cocoa Banana” to the tune of that unforgettable Barry Manilow hit, “Copacabana”—all because it rhymed with “Savannah.” I truly think my engineer husband missed his calling as a songwriter for Sesame Street, and that's all I'm saying about that as well.)
Sometimes his sister calls him “Beanhead.” Once she was severely reprimanded by her father for this. “That’s not very nice!” he said.
“But, he likes it,” she responded, and, sure enough, he nodded furiously in agreement, sealing his family nickname for posterity.
When Dog was a puppy, I instinctively called him “Baby.” That eventually became “Baby Dog” for all the reasons I have written about here. and here and here. But now that he is two and a half years old and quite the hefty, or as we prefer to think of it, “big-boned, muscular” animal, that name doesn’t quite fit, so we have reverted to the simple “Dog.”
I think in part I call him Dog to remind myself that even though he feels like a person to me (a person in a fur coat as some people have remarked), he is, after all, a dog.
And when he acts like a dog—digging in the trash for tasty leftovers, going outside to bury his bone and getting a muddy muzzle
right after his bath, or standing by the side of my chair and looking manipulatingly forlorn and letting out the slightest whimper while I eat my bar-b-que tri-tip dinner, I can’t get mad.
While any one of these behaviors would be appalling or at least frustrating in our human companions, we just smile, because despite his keen intelligence and winning personality and our desire to ascribe human emotions to him, he is essentially a dog.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.
Hubert Humphrey
I’m not entirely sure exactly what that means. But, it seemed like a good way to end. And something to think about.
