Pet Names

I'm not sure how it came up, the other day, but the girls and I were discussing what we would name a dog, if we had one. (We have no intentions of getting a dog, so I really don't know how the topic came up.) We decided that the hypothetical Loudshoes dog would be named Diego, if it was a boy, and Juanita, if it was a girl. (I guess we are getting a Puerto Rican dog.)
Part of the fun of getting a pet is naming it. And we've had our share of creative names, over the years.

When we were kids, the first pet my brother and I had was a blue budgie, named "Aquarius", being "the age of" and all that. (It was the '60's.) Then we got it a companion, and named it "Shannon", because we had been to Ireland for Christmas just before that, and we the colour of the bird reminded us of the colour of the grass when we were landing at the airport. (I smell the heavy-handed suggestion of a parent here.)
This has made the "stripper name" game much more fun that it would have been otherwise: to find your "stripper name", take the name of your first pet as your first name, and your mother's maiden name as a surname, hence I am "Aquarius Holland". "Shannon Holland" does not sound lacivious enough. (A girl I worked with at one time came up with the hilarious "Nibbles LaFleche".)

Then we had the most neurotic cat I ever saw, and her name was Mehitabel, as in the cat from Archy and Mehitabel, a column in a New York newspaper in the 20's. (My dad is an English professor; our lives were heavily influenced, whether we liked it or not.) Mehitabel was too much of a mouthful, so we just mainly called her "the cat". As in, "the cat just peed in the corner. Again."

Puca was our next cat. Puca is the Irish name for a ghost; a calm, quiet, gentlemanly ghost, as opposed to a poltergeist. She lived up to her name, admirably, for 18 years. She was very agreeable, and her idea of lavishing one with affection was to sit 2 feet away and purr loudly. As one of my cousins remarked about Puca, "you have a very inoffensive cat".

When I got married, we somehow ended up with two kittens, Luther and Sophie. Thing 1 was born while we had those cats, and we were mad that we had used up "Sophie" on a cat when we could have used it on a baby. Luther had about 8 toes on each foot, and made an enormous racket as he walked across the hardwood floors. He's the only cat you could hear coming from two rooms away. Luther also had the IQ of a carrot, and his named suited him entirely.

Toby came to us already assembled. He had a name, he had been fixed and he had all his shots. Since we were Toby's fourth owners in about a year and a half, we decided not to change his name because he had already had too many to remember. If we could have named him, though, we would have called him "Vinnie", because he has an air of a two-bit hood about him.
If we ever get a female cat, she will be "Phoebe".

I once heard of a friend of a friend who had two Jack Russell terriers named "Rico" and "Lola", and someone else who had two cats named "Lucy" and "Ethel". I also knew a guy with a fabulous dog named "Bob". ("Bob the Dog", if you were being formal, "Robert", if he was in big trouble.) I've also known dogs named "Quick", (Quickster the Lickster!"), "Nod" as in "Winken, Blinken and", a Scottie dog named "Angus McBigpipe", and a cat named "Meathead".

You know how weird kids have weird names? Turns out animals grow into their names too.