The Shit No One Tells You About Poodles

Naming the Poodle

After deciding on the little black ball of fluff with the curl in the middle of his forehead we had a week to poodle proof our house and had no idea what that entailed. Would he take to chewing our shoes? Drinking out of the toilet? Trying to get into the kitchen waste?

On top of that we had to give him a name. Some of the options were cute nick names from now long gone relatives of Bernard’s––there were no Geegees on my side of the family, and Russell or William or Henry weren’t poodle material.

When we lived in Vancouver at UBC, in grad student housing that backed onto the grand old growth Pacific Spirit forest there was a couple from Brussels who lived right next door, Celine and Ben, with whom we became friends and spent many hours chatting over bottles of wine or morning coffee and croissants. Usually they’d park their little boy on our bed, with a kid’s movie playing on the laptop while we had quite animated conversations about everything. I loved the chance to speak a little French with them from time to time.

Every morning during the week Celine would take their little boy off to school. Since it was Vancouver he was usually clad in a yellow raincoat. My office was on the second floor of the house, big window and I could look down and wave at the two as they headed off. This became a bit of a ritual. I’d say something in fractured French with the high voice of one of my French teachers from childhood and get a laugh from Celine and a wave from their little boy. He was the epitome of cute, big searching eyes and round dimpled cheeks.

His name was Hugo.

So here we were, days to go until we had to name the little dog only known as ‘green ribbon’. Hugo seemed to hit the right note. We phoned the kennel and Peter said “Hugo it is.”

That weekend when we arrived back at the breeders, Peter wouldn’t let us see Hugo until we had done all of the paper work. So, after a good thirty minutes of this he finally let the assistant bring Hugo out, carried like the most precious little royal baby, after which we could do nothing but faun over our Hugo. “You see why I didn’t bring him out earlier,” Peter said, trying unsuccessfully to get our attention.

When we got to the kitchen door, Peter told us to put him down and open the car door. The car was about half way down the driveway. We did as instructed, and Hugo did a side to side, to which I panicked, but finally ended up at the car.

I sat in the back with Hugo on the way home. I think he slept. The wheel alignment must have been off because I remember the car vibrating and think that it was somehow going to, well, let me put it this way, I check checking to seeing if Hugo was breathing. We stopped several times, along the way and once we got home we just put him on the floor and let him go, like a wind-up toy. He quickly checked out his new home, as if he already knew his way around. One of his favourite places to lie was beside the end of the sofa right under where I sat, which worked because all I could do was to keep reaching down and checking to see if he was breathing. To have this little thing as my charge was a huge responsibility. I had no idea how durable they are, only that he was very small and very black. Black against our black floor.

He also took to lying on my parka which after the first time, I had to regularly tossed on the floor for him to bed down in. We had a small bell on the door and he would ring it when he needed to go out for a pee which seemed every few minutes. We were gradually being trained.