The hardest part of having a pet isn’t the care part: feeding, watering, cleaning up. No, the hard part is naming your new friend.
I’m one to talk. My baby book notes that my first pets were a pair of goldfish which I named Flopsy and Mopsy. (I was a confused child.)
I had a duck named Fred, a turtle named Fred (I liked the name Fred) and a chicken that was such a non-pet-like pet that I never bothered to name it.
I didn’t get my first real companion pet till college, a cat. (My mother didn’t like cats or dogs. Fish were an ideal pet to her.)
I knew nothing about cats. I assumed they were like the dogs I had seen on TV and you could train them. So I set out to train my cat to come to the food bowl. Simple enough, right?
I would put out food and yell, ‘Here kitty, kitty, kitty,” which I thought was the universal kitty call. Apparently it wasn’t. He might come. He might not.
I decided he needed a little Pavlovian training. So I would whistle one of the two songs I could whistle, the theme from “Lassie,” and put out the food. And thus my cat became Lassie.
(The other song I could whistle was the theme from the “Andy Griffith Show” so Lassie was only a whisker away from being named Andy.)
Since then I’ve had cats, dogs, parakeets, pretty much everything but snakes or lizards. So I’ve named many pets: Petey the dog, Macy the cat, Fred the rabbit.
But until this past weekend I had never had a pet named for me.
Here’s how that came about. My wife Melanie was on a business trip to D.C. last week. Her conference got out mid-afternoon Saturday so she decided to drive partway back, spending the night with friends in Pearisburg, Virginia. Those friends, Pete and Mary Jane, have what the real estate ads call a baby farm. They have cats and dogs and horses and peafowl and goats, 57 goats.
And one of the 57 goats – apparently a nanny goat – chose Saturday night to become a mommy goat.
My wife says she and Mary Jane had just sat down at the dinner table when Pete came running in from the barn carrying the newborn goat in his arms, crying that the mother had rejected it and they should call the paramedics in Blacksburg. (Instead they called their daughter Maria in Blacksburg.)
Pete and Mary Jane ran around looking for blankets and steam pots and defibrillators and oxygen masks, leaving only one person to hold the baby goat, my wife. She has midwifed cats before but this was a first. She rocked the goat and cuddled it to keep it warm. She even encouraged one of the dogs to clean it.
Soon the little kid (that’s goat for baby) was up on her legs, wobbling around the kitchen. That’s when Maria and straightened things out. It seems the kid’s mother didn’t abandon her; Pete got the goats mixed up. The mother was off birthing a second kid causing Pete to think she had abandoned the first.
All the kid needed was a little TLC and she was alright.
As my wife was leaving Sunday morning, Pete and Mary Jane gave her the good news. They were going to name the goat that she had saved Melanie.
“I’m honored,” my wife stammered, not sure she really was.
And since there was the second baby goat, a buckling (boy goat), that also needed a name they were going to dub him Vince, as in Melanie and Vince.
It’s the first time anyone has ever named anything after me, much less a goat. I am honored.
I hope that someday Vince the baby goat gets to meet his namesake, Vince the old goat.
