The dog lay between us, snuggled up against both of our legs. Nary an ear flip responded to Sara's attempt at appellation.
"I don't know about Acorn," I said, but dutifully scribbled it down on the back of the information packet from the SPCA.
"Why not? He's kind of acorn colored." Sara stroked his head and garnered, for her efforts, a small smack of doggy lips.
When Riggs came home with us that first day, his vocabulary was, to put a point on it, limited. He'd kind of look at you if you said his name, but only if you happened to capture his attention with some other inducement, like a nice treat, or the leash. He also didn't respond to sit. Or stay. Or down. Or any of those other basics that it would seem like a sophisticated adult dog like Riggs would know.
But no. In the knowing words department, our new dog was receiving the dreaded "check-minus" of kindergarten report card grading.
The bright side, of course, was that his lack of knowledge of his name meant we could change it without any consequence. An extremely scientific poll (and by that I really mean there was no science behind it whatsoever) of the people we called on the way home from the SPCA gave the following results:
- Everyone but Sara's stepdad: Are you going to keep that name? (in a tone suggesting that a new name just might be a fantastic idea)
- Sara's stepdad: What's wrong with Riggs?
Thus, we found ourselves ensconced in our living room, enjoying a glass of wine with our friends Becca and Damon, who were the first to come over and see the dog née Riggs in his new home."What about foreign words?" I suggested.
"'Masana' means 'Sunshine' in Xitsonga," Sara suggested. Sara had spent two years in the Peace Corps in South Africa.
I gave a "Hey that doesn't sound too bad" shake of my head and tried. "Masana! Masana! Whosagoodboy?"
Nothin'.
I shrugged, wrote it down, and petted my still nameless dog.
We worked through a slew of more ideas, most of which were shot down by the very telling "Becca and Damon Think That's a Stupid Name" test. (Most of these were mine, by the way.) "Boomer" had some traction for a while. When we tried out the "Boomer! Boomer! Good boy!" test, the dog actually managed to lift his head from his forepaws and look up at Sara.
"Is your name Boomer?" she asked him earnestly.
The look in his eyes spoke volumes about how much he liked Sara, but not very much about what he thought of his potential moniker. He gave out a sigh and put his head down again.
"Awwwwwwwwwwwww," Becca cooed. I knew that Becca had wanted a dog of her own for a long time. However, her lifestyle didn't lend itself well to having one at this point, living as she did in a very nice but very small half of a duplex in San Francisco and working as a lawyer down on the Peninsula. She was wisely hitting the snooze button on her doggie-ological clock. Of course, when I had emailed her boyfriend Damon to ask about vet recommendations on the Peninsula, it was Becca who had called back and said "I wanna come see the puppy!" before I could even get out "Hello."
"Boomer does have a nice sci-fi connotation to it," I noted as I wrote it down on the list.
"Yeah, but is your dog a Cylon?" Damon asked. Damon and I spoke the common language of nerds.
I hadn't noticed any red lights swinging back and forth across the dog's field of vision, so I was pretty sure he wasn't a robotic Cylon. He could have been one of those new-fangled "looks just like a biological organism but is still a robot" Cylons, though. He was certainly cute enough.
What this entire conversation and exercise was patently ignoring, though, was the fact that Sara had named the dog years ago. When we would talk about getting a dog, there was always a name that she would bring out for our imaginary future pet. She had been quite consistent about it. I guess she was trying to give me some sense of ownership, but the fact of the matter was this dog had his name already, and maybe she was just waiting for me to remember or re-suggest it before plunging in.
The next morning, as the dog came bounding down the stairs, Sara said to me, "I dunno about Boomer. I know I liked it yesterday, but today..."
"Well, what about Oscar?" I said, perhaps finally getting my cue. "You've liked that name for a long time."
"Oscar? Oscar!" Sara said, half at me and half at the dog.
The dog looked up, but more at the leash in Sara's hand than at Sara's voice.
And so, that day I found myself back at Petsmart in front of the automated dog-tag machine again, plonking my two tokens into it like an oversized tween in front of a video game at Chuck E. Cheese. The screen came up, and I typed in his new name. The machine went to work, and within a minute, a finely engraved blue metalic dog bone dropped into the dispenser.Oscar. Our dog's name is Oscar.
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