The Doggies

It started off playfully enough.

Big A and Li’l A and I have different surnames. (Long story; some other time.) Anyway, for emotional reasons, I’ve been meaning to find us a new family name. Of course, we started with the obvious suspects, a mix of our family names: we tried Wandawasi (one of my family names) coupled with Laskey (part of his) as in “the Wandawasi-Laskeys are all crazy” but that’s just so tediously fangled.

We needed something else.

Long ago, we’d watched an American-Desi movie (in fact, it might have even been called American Desi) in which the FOB cousin mangled the “dawg” greeting and hailed his homies with “Hello Doggies.” That totally cracked us up for days after. And so, for years now, we’ve been calling each other “Doggie.” Except when Big A is mad at me and yells, “Sweet Baby Puppy” (because you know, the fact that he’s actually yelling at me coupled with mean names could traumatize me forever).

So last night after he returned from work at 11:30, we’re gnawing this to bits again, and he facetiously said that perhaps we should just go with “Doggie” except perhaps we could ethnicize the spelling a bit so it’s not too obvious. I came up with “Daghix” (‘x’ silent) and “Daghe” (with an accent on the ‘e’) and we fell asleep laughing.

This morning, I realized that I’m 100% in love with the name and 90% serious about actually changing our name to Daghe (more Indian sounding). While we were stopped at a red light, I confess this and was stunned when the normally super sensible Big A shared that he likes the name 90% and is 40% serious about adopting it.

Helllllooooo Daghès!

Update: Li’l A came home from school and said: No way. It’s a strange day when the voice of reason comes from the seven-year-old.

Update Again: Big A just reminded me that the movie was actually Dude, Where's the Party and the line was actually, "Hello, Doggie friends!" (which is infinitely funnier!)