An obsession with naming things has plagued my family for generations. But not just naming them, for that implies that once a thing is named, we move on with our lives. This is not the case. The fact is, we not only have an obsession with naming things, we have an obsession with renaming them.
My father, whose name was Norman, gave himself the alias Charles Black, which he used to request work-related brochures by mail. My older sister, Julie, renamed herself Julianza in her 50s, and she changed her youngest daughter's name from Isabel to Amadea when she was seven.
It's no secret that Jewish tradition is itself a bit obsessive about the do's and don'ts of naming (don't name after a living relative; do name after a relative that's died -- but not if they've died tragically; do name after someone of good character; don't change the name once it's given). But this is not why my family obsesses over names. We obsess over names because we believe the names we give speak volumes about the people we are.
Which is what I was thinking about last week as my husband and I made arrangements to adopt a 3-year-old cocker spaniel from a rescue organization in Georgia. His name was Robbie. Operative word: was.
Nothing is inherently wrong with the name Robbie. It even kind of fit him. But, of course, this was not enough. Because a name (so the story goes in my family) must express the namer's deepest affiliations, greatest aspirations, profoundest familial ties and be completely unique. It must be simple to pronounce but hard to pin down, like a foreign word you almost (but don't quite) know the meaning of, and be so lovely you feel compelled to turn it over and over again in your mouth.
Lastly, the name must cause people to look at the named with shining reverence as a silent but definitive "Yes!" forms in their brain at the way the moniker somehow both cradles and elevates the named. Which Robbie just did not do.
My husband doesn't care that much about names. As someone who has gone by his middle one all his life (Daryl) rather than his given one (Cecil), he feels at most like a name shouldn't embarrass you. Beyond that, the field is wide open. Which is why, at the beginning of the renaming process for Robbie, I could only get him to play along for a few moments.
"Leaf?" I would say. "Sky? Streeter? Ridge?"
"Cooper? Hollis? Teddy? Riley?" he would say, and then, as if waking from a dream only to realize it was a dream, he would say. "That's it! I'm not doing this anymore!"
On the morning before we went to get the dog, I handed him pen and paper. "We're down the wire," I said commandingly. "Write down the following headings: Favorite Writers, Artists, Psychological Concepts and Preferred Letters of the Alphabet. Then jot down names associated with each."
Which, surprisingly, he agreed to do. This generated a list of names so absurd and pretentious and just plain unutterable when paired with the kinds of conversations we would actually be having with the dog ("Go potty, Rauschenberg"; "Hemingway want to go for a walkie?") that we almost decided to keep the innocuous Robbie.
Except I couldn't, for the reasons outlined above. And so, for the two-hour drive to the kennel, and back home again with the dog on my lap, and all that first night, and the next morning staring at the new dog on our sofa, I continued to ponder names: biblical ones (Noah? Shalom?), names from mythology (Apollo? Zeus?), ridiculous names cobbled from the letters of other beloved dogs' names (Shrella? Broomer? Keitannie?).
"You know," my husband said, "Theodore is a good name."
I stared at him in disbelief. It was name with absolutely no connection to anything or anyone we'd ever known. It was completely devoid of meaning. It was not surprising or slightly foreign-sounding. It was as if, after all the hours of ponderous discussion, my husband had failed to grasp the very point of naming, which was to anoint the named with some profound aspect of the self.
"That makes no sense," I spat. I then listened incredulously as some unthinking part of myself said, "But Theo sure is cute."
Which is how the dog formerly known as Robbie became the dog currently known as Theo.
Dana Shavin's memoir, "The Body Tourist," is due for release on Nov. 1. Contact her at Danalise@juno.com.