You Name It
The newbdaughter is starting to acquire a respectable menagerie of stuffed animals who are also starting to attract her attention more and more. She sleeps with two in the crib, has one at day care, has two in the living room and has another six or so that we break out from time to time. She loves them all. This is not a post about how cute she is. This is a post about my problem.
You see, these toys started out as generic labels: bear, puppy, bunny, etc. but for some reason, it has become my habit – nay – my duty to name them all and import, to some of them, a back story.
The newbwife laughs at my almost compulsory need to name them. And name them I do: Gomez the laughing mutant dog, Tyrone the camouflage tiger, Woody the dolphin from Wildwood, Floaty the toy crab, Augustupus the toy octopus, the finger puppets Claude the Haitian crab and Jerome the Lion with a Scottish accent.
Am I the only one who does this? Maybe the guy who wrote Genesis had the same compulsion and transferred it to Adam:
Genesis 2:19 (King James): And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
soon, my son, your clever naming of your daughter’s small collection of stuffed menagerie items will transmogrify into your daughter’s random naming of a cornucopic hording of individual and equally life-affirming stuffed, imaginary and flesh-and-blood friends whose individual identities you will not only be expected to remember and recognize but also in whose existences you will be expected to invest personal and emotional capital.
than, and only then, you will have arrived.
and when you do, i will welcome you to the fold. and i will be laughing. sardonically and empathetically.