Dogs and Their Names

Chance
Originally uploaded by dogfaceboy.

We tried to talk our seven-year-old daughter out of naming the new dog Chance. After all, it was taken from one of her movies. It wasn't at all original like my husband's and my choice, Wile E. We showed her pictures of the cartoon coyote to help our case, but Serena wasn't biting. She called him Chance about a bazillion times until he wouldn't answer to anything else.

When we got him, in August, he looked more like a Wile E. He was a scrawny 29 pounds the day we met in Federal Hill. A stray, he had been picked up by animal control and was slated for termination. But a good soul looked into the dog's eyes and called a local rescuer, who took the then-19-pound, year-old mutt under her wing. She called him Happy because of his eyes.


Names say more about the owners than they do about the pets, no matter how hard we pretend otherwise. In my lifetime, I have had a collie named Lambchop, an Afghan hound named Orpheus, an airdale named Hercules, a white Persian cat named White Cat, a tabby named Clyde (who had a retarded sister named Bonnie), and then some black and white dogs named Susan and Martha Washington. When I got a chance to name a dog, back in kindergarten, I blew it. He was a black wiry wisp of a dog, and I named him Lion.

But when I grew up, I had a special name at the ready for any dog that wandered into my life: Beowulf. And so, when two little mutts were found in a dumpster, we adopted them, and the male became Beowulf. He was the love of my life.

Beowulf was such a kind and gentle soul (unless you happened to be a squirrel), and he was smart. We could send him up the steps for his frog, and he would return with it. Then we'd send him back up for his bone, and he'd return with it. He could say, "I love you," just like the dog in the Little Caesar's commercial. He could howl on command.

We called him King of the Geats; Wulf McMannus, Attorney at Dog; Wulfie; Woof; and Dogfaceboy. He was so smart that we were certain he was really a dog-faced boy.

Wulf's sister was Cleopatra, Queen of Denial, but she died just weeks later of Leptospirosis, a disease that eventually killed Wulf eight years later (survivors often die of kidney disease, which Wulf developed at five).

Wulf had become very ill in my eighth month of pregnancy, but he was my pal. He would not leave my side and knew he had to hang on until the baby was born. And so he did. The first month of pictures of me and Serena (a name I chose in my teens after the wicked cousin on "Bewitched") featured Wulf on the sofa beside me.

When we first moved here with Wulf, a puppy wandered in our yard to stay. Not having had a chance to use the name Cleopatra to its full potential, we crowned the new dog, a lab/border collie mix, Cleo (Cleopatty, Cleo P P, Cloppy).

She and Wulf had puppies two years later (born during my fifth month of pregnancy), and we kept the fat one, the first born, the roly poly Buddha. I named him, too.

Buddha (Boo Boo, Buddhalicious, Boo Diddly) was another gentle dog, just like his dad, but he was fast and actually caught the squirrels he hunted. He didn't, however, catch the fox he chased out of the woods and onto rush hour traffic two Thanksgivings ago.

Buddha and Beowulf are buried in the back yard. They make the daffodils more beautiful every year, the tomatoes sweeter.

After Buddha died, we had wanted another second dog, but we weren't making much effort toward finding him. Then I got an e-mail about a dog named Happy, and I knew it was our chance to make a difference in a doggy's life.

We call our guy Second Chance, Chancery, Chancer Dancer, Chanceroo. He rolls in dead animal, empties the trash can about once a month onto the kitchen floor, goes crazy when it's dinnertime, begs like crazy, and has gotten out of the yard twice (once he went out the front gate and couldn't figure out how to get back in it, so he went around to the back and barked for us). Within his first few weeks, he knocked me down by running into my legs while I was running, causing me to fall and tear my rotator cuff and give me sciatica.

But every time I see his face, his one ear up, his other down, I have to smile. When he leaves a mess of coffee grounds and ice cream containers and tissues all over the kitchen floor, I have to scream with my back to him. Because if I turn around, it's all over. I melt.

Wile E. might describe him better, but it was chance that we found each other. My daughter once told me, shortly after we got our new dog, "We should just give our lives over to Chance."

As if we had a choice.