There Are Some Who Call Me...

So we decided to be a two pet household. I don't think that is something we put on any census form, but it was a consideration for the first pet. We have known that Annie does not play well with others. It is partly because she is a mix between the most paranoid / break glass in the event of anything that might remotely resemble an emergency dog breed and the slightly off kilter canine version of Vietnam era tunnel rats.

We decided to go with a cat. We went to adopt one from a local PetSmart. We saw a neat black and white cat named Moo-Moo, but we were told that to adopt him, we had to wait until a Saturday for the adoption team. We learned that another store could do direct adoptions, so we went there instead.
Sure enough, there were two orange cats. One of them named Max was 10 years old and declawed. We were pulled to Max because he had quite the sob story.
The other orange had white markings and was five months old.

We called Max's foster family to ask some key questions about his behavior. In a stroke of luck, the foster was a former coworker of ours. She told us that she knew Julie and me and knew enough about Annie that Max would not be a good fit. That led us to the orange and white, named Ivy.

We both knew a name change was in order. Ivy wasn't going to work. Maybe a couple of years ago, Ivy would have made me think of Posion Ivy, nemesis of Batman. Now, it makes me think of the itchy rash on my arms and the biopsy done by my dermatologist that redefined ‘spongiform.’

Julie’s first recommendation for a name was Groucho. This was a nod both to the cat’s temperament and her wild hair. But the masculine name didn’t seem quite right. Since her willingness to be held was predicated on giving her kitten treats, the next name suggested was Miss Piggy. This didn’t seem to be flattering at all, so we started thinking on a broader scale.

How could we incorporate Annie into the picture? Well, for awhile after we rescued Annie, we called her Little Orphan Annie. We thought about Daddy Warbucks. Or Mommy Warbucks. My only request was that the name be Daddy (or Mommy) War Bucks. That way, I could say the cat’s middle name was War. This would make Annie a dog of war, right?

Well, that didn’t work out.

The next two names came from our fandom of artists we see live every chance we get. Name #6 was Pearl. This was a nod to Amanda Shires, fiddle player extraordinaire. But the orange and white didn’t fit our cat. So what about Neko?

Now we were on to something. We love Neko Case. I am pretty confident that I have seen Neko every time she has been through DFW, including that appearance with A Fine Frenzy and Rufus Wainwright and her first appearance at Sons of Hermann Hall. Our friend Julian told us that Neko meant ‘cat’ in Japanese. Perfect!

But then we found out what the Japanese slang for Neko meant. Now, we don’t hang out with a hipster Japanese crowd. We have seen Lost in Translation and want to visit Shinto temples and experience the new jazz scene in Tokyo, but we don’t get to interact everyday with cool kids from Kyoto. Still the possibility of eliciting giggles at our cat’s name was enough for us to strike that choice from the list.


Choice #8 was… Groucho. I don’t think this was so much a surrender to the unexpected difficulty of naming a cat. I think this was more a reference to her interaction with Annie.

Choice #9 was also a repeat. We were back to Miss Piggy. Julie even found out that Miss Piggy’s real name is Pigathius Lee. Still, what a mark to put upon our new cat’s forehead! Piggy?
But it did fit. So maybe we needed to stick with this reference. Option #10: Olivia. A pig from children’s literature. Heck, I can’t write a children’s story, but we could name our cat after a character. How about a derivative? Option #11: Olive. This was Popeye’s love interest. We could work with this. And we thought we had it.

Until a moment of genius, that is. The Aran Islands. Just off the coast of Ireland. Inisheer. Inishmore. Inishmaan. Aran! What a great name. We tried it. It fit. We felt pretty comfortable with it.
Then our friend Jed crushed our positivity, as he is wont to do. He told us that Aran sounded too much like Aryan. Knowing that we are sensitive to avoiding any misrepresentation on this subject, he successfully needled us into abandoning name #12.

So we moved to the east a little. Back to the mainland of Ireland. The town of Doolin rests in County Clare. County Clare is a welcoming and peaceful area in a country that holds many good memories for both us and our families. Lucky #13: Clare.

Jourangadons

I am glad that McVey has been introduced so early in these blog posts. This befits someone that told me I needed to read to Catcher in the Rye. You would think that he made the suggestion during our junior year of highschool, but it didn't happen that way. I didn't read it until about two years after college. How do you get a liberal arts degree without reading Catcher in the Rye? McVey also got me into writing. My first efforts at short stories and a screenplay were all read by him first.

Also, McVey was blogging before it was cool. Unlike my current efforts at blogging many years after blogging became popular. In the days of geocities web sites, McVey introduced the net to Walton Walker's Shoebox. The idea was based upon a basement apartment he lived in around the turn of the millenium. This place was a typical apartment, except for the fact that I would not have even been able to sleep there. One of the doors in his bedroom led to nowhere.

Check that, nowhere would have been preferable. As it was, one of his doors opened to this large open area that was basically a crawlspace. Except that most crawlspaces have a clearance of about 2 and a half feet. This crawlspace was about six feet tall. So imagine a 500 square foot crawl space with mounds of dirt about five feet tall preventing you from seeing more than two or three feet ahead of you except for the ground floor window entry you could see about 75 feet away.

Somewhere in this underworld that was also his water heater closet, McVey concocted a shoebox which contained the greatest memories and stories of Walton Walker. This was not the general in the Patton's Third Army who couldn't find a way across a river and namesake of a Dallas thruway, but a slacker turned young executive that had lived there before he did. They were basically blog posts. Stories about concerts, work, and the like filled his web page.

Around this time, he wrote one of the best children's stories I have ever read. It was about a jourangadong that lived in the forest outside of a town filled with characters. I find writing for children very difficult. This does not come as a surprise to those that know me well, because I have great difficulty communicating with children on any level, much less the written word. I tried. I read all of Daniel Pinkwater's stuff I could get my hands on. It makes sense that his work I enjoyed most consisted of essays he did for Smithsonian magazine.

I have always seen this as my next challenge. Can I write a good children's story? Unfortunately, there are about a dozen other types of writing and subjects that get in the way. Someday, though, my first effort will be on these pages.