"Thou Shalt Call Thy Canine Jelly"

When I decided to allow a furry companion into our life, I didn’t bargain on two things. One, the all-consuming, extremely pathetic puppy love I would experience (I just adore that goofy, four-legged shower mat), and two, the automatic membership card you receive to the dog owner’s club. People I’ve seen four days a week for 8 years at my park down the hill, who had never so much as flung a bead of sweat in my direction, now stop me to admire my dog. Give treats to my dog. Swap training stories about our dogs. Invariably, during one of these sharing moments, I get asked, how did you come up with the name Jelly? Regaling the sequence of events that culminated in naming our pup after a pantry staple, generally takes longer than the requisite 10-second answer…so here it is:

My husband and I went on a romantic vacation to Rome last year. Our first night out we consumed vast quantities of wine, celebrating the lack of sulfites that would supposedly safeguard us against hangovers (it doesn’t). We might have also been drowning our worries about our lost luggage… which is why at around 3:00am European time, I am stumbling around our hotel room, naked and pissed off that my head feels like a bass drum that is being pounded on by a steroidal weight lifter. After impaling myself on the bidet (not what you think – the bathroom was the size of a cereal box) and muttering a few choice interjections – I wake up my husband to tell him about the very weird dream I had that involved a dog named Jelly who spoke in an English accent and was a nanny for our children. Since we were staying the distance of a leash from St. Peters in Vatican City, we laughingly decided that if we were ever stupid enough to get a dog, we better heed “the vision.” So, how did we come up with the name Jelly? We didn’t. It was divinely ordained.