NAMING A DOG

Naming a dog is a creative enterprise wrought by the nagging anxiety of living with getting it wrong.  I haven’t had that many opportunities in life to name things.  For someone writing a novel or working at the dog shelter I suppose putting names to personalities, however ephemeral their presence might be in our story, must somehow become like that of the lifelong haberdasher who with one glance after walking through the storefront says, “forty-two short”.  Just as I don’t possess the skill to size suit customers from the changing room doorway, I lack the ability to give a name to another being without considerable mental effort and many try-ons.

Winston Churchill called his re-occurring depression the big black dog, but I have a small black dog who is anything but depressed.  A six-month old lab-mix puppy (perhaps mixed with a beagle) who will likely remain undersized, he is out-of-the-box as close to the perfect disposition I could ever hope for in a dog not unlike my wife who also seems to have just been born that way.  He is naturally and without any need for correction, just…plain…good.  He’s easy going, pleasant, and, like we hope for in any great relationship, seems to love me for my life and nothing more.  So?  How does one do this living thing justice when it comes to assigning a moniker?

Our small black dog went into the proverbial name-changing room no less than fifty times.  We pitched and posted a handful of candidates to our modest social media accounts, and in return we received many counter proposals all of which were given a go. 

Among the candidates there were clusters of genre.  There were Gaelic, German, Thai, and Japanese names considered.  As the only non-Thai member of my family, I was surprised to find I was the only one leading the charge on the Thai names perhaps because I’ve always thought it was kind of cool that I married a Thai woman.  It’s kind of exotic when you think about it.  Get that coolness out there in the form of a dog name, I thought.  Maybe, just maybe, I wrestle with a little white guilt that we don’t have better representation of that culture in our family’s lives.  -But even as the sole Thai advocate, I’d have to admit Thai words often hit my very Americanized ear as mumbles, the sort of slurry sounds I imagine I made when I drunk dialed an old friend during college (sorry, Thai folks).  The Japanese alternatives quickly supplanted my Thai suggestions, and why not?  There are so many cool sounds in Japanese words like kohs and kais.  The language is phonetic gold.  The Japanese names got a lot of play, and hey!  At least they were Asian.

The German and Gaelic names do a great job of calling to mind all kinds of European imagery.  A good pick from this category spawns all kinds of imaginings of walking between the bog and the fog-draped gray castle walls with your loyal hound by your side, the kind of dog walks capped off with a good book and a pipe nestled in a tattered wingback chair by the fire.  -But I don’t have most of those things and have yet to own enough tweed to really make this image even begin to work.  Besides, Matt, it’s Colorado not the Emerald Isle.  Get over yourself. These names were quickly dispatched.

Then there were stolen character names from high and not so high-brow literature.  Marvel comic book character names had a prolific if not strong showing.  I pitched hard the name ‘JARVIS’, the name of the AI operating system Tony Stark’s Ironman is constantly looking to for assistance.  I liked this name because I imagined I would be bouncing a lot of my best and not so best ideas off this four-legged companion.  Maybe I can’t have the kick-ass suit, but perhaps I could at least have my own JARVIS.  The thinking here was empirically sound.  It turns out I really do bounce my ideas off of him.  What’s that boy?  Better posture on my seoinage entry?  I’m a sloucher, so it is gonna take some practice, but if you say so.

If you take a good look at my dog, he really does have, to my way of thinking, a strong canine resemblance to Paul Bettany, the actor who voices JARVIS in the Ironman movies.  Despite being undersized, he is kind of lanky.  In much the same way I have difficulty imagining a guy like Paul Bettany hanging out with the short, gruff likes of me, (because Paul is tall and soft-spoken with a seemingly natural erudition), I somehow in my fifties became the tickled owner of a Lab.  Me!…a Lab owner!  Labs project an emotional stability that for good chunks of my adult life I did not always feel I possessed, so it is easy to imagine my dog in that JARVIS voice saying, Sir, you’re at 9% power, your suit’s outer shell is highly compromised, and that alien bench presses entire city blocks.  Are you sure you want to go through with this plan [cue the puppy eyes]?  I need a calming voice like that in my life to check me.

Names can honor ideas or people we once held dear.  In giving a nominal identity to something or someone else we also project onto them a little of our own.  My son, Emerson, was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and author I admired and still owe readings even a quarter of century after pilfering the name.  Despite the copy-cats I’ve since discovered among my son’s classmates, it proved a good pick.  My son lives up to the name insofar as I understand his namesake.  Whether he achieves fame or fortune; or passes his life in relative anonymity, which the overwhelming majority of us will do, I am proud to know he is a quality human being.  -And that’s what really matters to me.

-And with that guiding thought, that’s how we ultimately landed on the name our dog was given.  It started out as a joke really, -a joke by my daughter I was reluctant to make permanent if only for the haunting memories of having been stuck with ‘BEAR’ as the name of our Australian Cattle Dog many years before.  ‘BEAR’ wasn’t a bad name, but it was a name picked by the limited creativity of a four-year-old, and dads acquiesce to such choices to make their kids happy.  Now, I thought, was my chance to strike a creative blow.

“I need to call him something while we decide on something to call him,” my daughter and recent college graduate, Keagan, said, “I’m going to call him ‘TODD’,” which she rolled out with the nasally deadpan snarky-ness of Tawwd.  -And after a couple of days using the temp name as the permanent name debate raged on, the placeholder began to develop a quality of stickiness.  More specifically, as Todd’s personality revealed itself, it became clear my understanding just had to catch up with what was already a very accurate name.  He really is Tawwd.

Todd is just a guy, -just an ordinary guy like anyone might hope for in a really good friend.  Todd is never going to be able to lend me money, loan me his timeshare, or network me into a better job, but he is all the other really important, genuine and authentic stuff one might want from a really good friend.  He is the best kind of ordinary dog. 

My daughter’s joke took on a life of its own as we imagined the anthropomorphized Todd working as a WalMart greeter, a job I revere despite being the butt of many jokes.  Like a WalMart greeter, Todd doesn’t ask for much, doesn’t get much materially, or insist on anything.  He is humble.  The good greeters rise above the jokes conveying a gentle presence, -a priesthood of smiles so that if nothing else good happened that day, you got that smile to take with you from a kindly person who probably left for work that day with less of a promise than you had.  That’s an honorable vocation, and yes, we could all easily see Todd being that guy, -happy to be alive, -happy to have purpose, and there smiling.  Hello!  Welcome to WalMart, my name is Todd.