About 15 years ago, my oldest son Christiaan and his partner Brad had two big dogs named Davy (a rescue from Virginia) and Goliath.
I loved those names, if not the dogs themselves. At one point, we had two kittens named Bastet and Balzac. The original Bastet was an Egyptian goddess associated with and often depicted as a cat. My cat named Bastet was easily as aloof and dignified as an Egyptian goddess; therefore, she earned that name.
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. Wiki-pedia states, “La Comédie humaine is a novel sequence generally viewed as his magnum opus.” Balzac, the kitten, was named in his honor because she was such a comedian.
Currently Chris has a Lakeland terrier who was an AKC Grand Champion show dog. After she was retired from the dog show circuit, she was much in demand by breeders. They only bred her twice, I think. Now, she is Chris’s beloved pet.
Her call name (whatever that means) is Etta; however, as you may suspect, she has a really grand name: Brocair’s Back in Time at High Hills.
Etta is easier to remember.
I have written about our rescue dog, Taz. He was born in April of 2022, and we got him when he was a cute, wiggly, four-month-old puppy. At that time, I had just retired from teaching and was taking Spanish at SMCC.
The puppy certainly had features of other breeds but was largely a boxer. I thought the stars — me learning Spanish and the dog being part boxer — had collided, and I lobbied intensely for Kya to name him Oscar de la Hoya. I cajoled and pleaded with her, but she named him Taz. How pedestrian and predictable.
One of Kya’s friends, Madison, calls him Tazarrion, a nod to all the -arrion names many young men have now. Tradarrion. Kevarrion. LaGarrion. And on. And on.
As you can probably tell, I still wish she had named him Oscar de la Hoya.
My youngest son Tom has pit bulls that he breeds. He has a male named Chuck Taylor that he takes with him to Tractor Supply for supplies for Carole Baskin’s new litters of puppies, on the premise that Chuck is the father and should be responsible and involved in his offsprings’ lives. Tom is just trying to teach Chuck to own up and be accountable.
Several years ago, our school nurse was blessed with a kitten that wandered up on her carport. She named the kitten after a male student because he was diagnosed with ADHD and the kitten was extremely active.
Every day at school, she gave Stanley (not the student’s real name) his morning meds and regaled him with stories of his namesake until his meds kicked in and he could go to class.
One morning, she told Stanley that she had named the kitten prematurely as she found out it was a female. He asked how she found that out. The nurse was taken aback and tried to think of what she would say.
“Well, I uh…”
Stanley interrupted her, “Never mind. I know.”
She asked, “You do?”
He replied, “You googled it!” She gave a sigh of relief.
