Chapter 3: Names and Pedigree

I was born 105 years ago on the Scholten farm in Iron Springs, Alberta (Canada, North America, Earth, etc.). That would have been in about 1992. My mom's name was Bessie. By one of those rarest of coincidences, Bessie was also her human name. Everyone's heard of it happening before, but I've never personally known anydog else that it's happened to, nor has any of the dogs I've known known it to have happened to any of their acquaintances. It was Dick Scholten who somehow named her with her real name. He named me too. He was my first master, really the only one I've ever had or considered as such--out of sheer love. (A dog's love is about the purest form of love there is. It's like sunshine: pure and powerful and streaming and practically endless.) Anyway, in those earliest mythic days I thought he'd keep me with him forever. But here am I now, a hundred years later and fourteen thousand miles away, keeping watch over a corpse.

Racially speaking, I'm a black lab. Bessie was what you'd call a purebred and so was Jake. I never thought of Jake as my dad, and not just because he lived on the farm across the highway. This may be strange for humans, but while every dog recognizes his mother, we don't really recognize the concept of fatherhood. At best, we have the sketchy category of "sire." But even that's antiquated dog-ese. Basically nowadays every other dog is either your mother or your friend or your enemy and after awhile even your mother just becomes your friend or your enemy.

There were six of us in our litter, me and my five sisters. That was the second miraculous coincidence: there were six kids in the Scholten clan too, Dick and his five sisters. I guess it was out of some kind of identification that Dick picked me out and kept me. One of my sisters ended up on the neighbor's farm with Jake. They called her Lady, but I always thought she was kind of a bitch. The other four were given away and never to be seen again. So basically while I lived on the farm, it was just me and my mom.

Dick named me Spirit, but my real name was Reggie. I don't know why I put that last statement in the past tense. I guess from time to time I still identify myself with the name. Usually though I feel beyond the reach of proper names--dog or human--altogether. I'm anyone or no-one. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way.