What's in a Name?

How do you go about renaming a dog that has been bequeathed to you? Karen gave us her dog (see my previous post about the Rainbow bridge). Jim and I are laughingly thinking of renaming her. Her full name is Suzie Q. Her new name should be Suzie Shadow or Suzie Sentry because she follows Jim wherever he goes during the day. When he moves, she moves. She is never more than two inches from his side. She seems to have re-dedicated her life from Karen to Jim. I know Karen would be happy that Suze is happy.

The renaming conversation reminded me of the time that Corey wanted to change his first name. He was about eleven. He had just been at a baseball game where Storm Davis lobbed him a ball from the warm up pen. So, Corey decided he wanted to change his name to Storm. Storm Glover.

So for a few weeks, Jim and I humoured him and called him Storm. If we forget, “Corey” would remind us that he was no longer to be called “Corey”, he was now Storm.

I researched name changes and found out that it cost some $75.00 at the time to process a legal name change. And Corey wanted it to be processed legally. I said that his dad and I would pay half the cost, but Corey would have to pay the other half to become “Storm”.

As you can imagine, $37.50 is a lot of money for an eleven year old. How to choose – the name change or saving for the latest and greatest video game? I got the paperwork done but by the time it came to payment, Corey had decided that he really didn’t need to be Storm if it cost $37.50 (score to the video game).

(As an aside, my Mom said at the time that she adamantly refused to call him “Storm” even if he got his named legally changed. She said that she would re-characterize his nickname to be “Corey” because he would always be Corey to her.)

There is no charge for changing Suzie Q’s name, but there are a whole bunch of memories stored in her name. I don’t think we will change it. What do you think, almost-Storm Glover?