What’s In a Name

In the 1950s when I was a kid, Dad worked away for a month at a time building houses for farmers and doing different odd job repairs for the local council. Then, as a wonderful surprise one Christmas, he brought back a pup for us kids.

We found it hard for all of us to agree on a name for the pup. After a lot of arguments amongst us kids, when finally mum had had enough of all the trouble that naming the dog was causing, she told us all with no uncertainty, “The pup will be called ‘Dog’”.

As Dog became older, he got smarter. Our sister would like to play dress ups and put doll clothes on Dog. He’d run away biting at the clothes struggling to pull them off and chew them in disgust. They were dresses after all, no dog should have put up with that.

We taught Dog some tricks, so when he got better at doing them, we would take him for a walk down the street to show him off doing his tricks to passersby. One day a lady walking along stopped to pat him and he stood on his hind legs, the lady asked for his name, we said Dog, “He’s very good at doing that trick, you should call him Performer”, she said.

That sounded good at the time, so he was renamed him Performer.

After a few more months had gone by, he started chasing cars. It didn’t matter what we did, we couldn’t get him to stop that bad bahaviour. Dad reckoned, “You all should call him Copper, because of the way he is chasing down cars”.

So, he was called Copper from then on.

One day, while Copper was chasing after a truck, a car coming in the opposite direction hit him, severing at the joint one of his rear legs clean off.

Now that slowed him down.

No more tricks for him, no more chasing cars, it meant Copper needed another name change, So, once again Copper had to be renamed.

After the accident and once he had recovered from his injuries, he would just lay and look at the cars and trucks passing with an envious look in his eye. Yes, just one eye, because during he’s recovery he lost the other eye in another accident whilst he was running around chasing balls we had thrown in the paddock.

My oldest brother thought to renamed him Cyclops, this only served to give the poor mutt a complex. He wasn’t very happy with that name.

Mum said, “Only monsters have one eye, and that eye was in the middle of their forehead.”

So, the problem continues; now what could you call a dog that was no good at his tricks anymore and only had one eye?

One day at school we were learning about angles, right angles, pyramids and tripods. Now that sounded perfect. Tripods only have three legs, so we thought that could be his new name.

Dad told us, “If you lot don’t keep the dog clean, I’ll change his name to Flea Bag.”

That poor dog has had to put up with enough already in his short life. So, we renamed him just once more, and now we just call him Dog once again.

Through his life he had enough of being called different names at the drop of our whim, the one name he always answers to and the name which gets his tail wagging is Dog!