When I was Let me think here for a minute. Let’s go with Let’s see sixteen, fifteen, four-, th-, ok so sixth grade. So ten.

When I was eight or nine, my mom and I watched someone’s dog for them. It was a beagle. I don’t remember its name. And though I don’t recall any stories about it, that doesn’t make it any less important of a character in the world, only in the tiny micro-drop of my lived life. It was that dog, though, or the experience of having that dog temporarily that moved my nomadic soul to desire my own wolf.

I begged and begged my mother to get a dog. To get me a dog. We didn’t have a lot of resources, and she was raising me by herself, and I don’t think I had yet given her any reason to think that I would be a careful and conscientious dog caretaker. I was very young but perhaps she felt that I just needed an opportunity to learn responsibility.

I really wish that I knew what got her to change her mind. There are so many things I never talked with her about while she was here. I didn’t sit and visit and learn as much about her as I should have. How many times do we hear people express this and still do it ourselves. I should have when I could have. Now, learning more about her motivations and hopes is something I might have a tiny chance of doing if I become a scholar of Anna, digging through old papers and photos and traveling long distances to interview people. An exploration into gray Hades. I need to free myself of that moment to talk to you about a dog of whom I also know very little.

I must have been ten by the time I got the dog. I’m going to say that I was nine, maybe on the cusp of ten when we dogsat the beagle. It wouldn’t have been like me, I don’t think, anyway, to have the focus and persistence to beg and wish for something for two years. And I know I had taken up skateboarding by the time I got Houdini, and skateboarding appeared in my life along with Jason, the son of Chuck, the fiancé of my mother. I know this because the first name Houdini had was Lance, after Lance Mountain.

Of all of the inconsistent things about me, one consistency that has long existed is my love of giving things names. Sometimes, and usually, those names are like we think of — Lance, Ona, Vesper, Pachomios. But naming has another sense. Naming in this other sense is more of an act. I mean giving my dog the name Lance is an act, but it ends (not just chronologically ends, but extends no further in meaning) with the label. That dog is “Lance”. That naming establishes a kind of authority. I will say who you are. I have the power to know you, and this is a name to which you will now respond. A person discovering the name of a demon in order to cast it out seems like this. But what of that story where Legion names the Son of God? The demon proclaims something even man has not seen, and then is evicted from the poor man who has been wandering the graveyard in tatters of clothing and soul. Legion is flung into a herd of swine and rages off a cliff into darkness. The demon names Christ aloud before the other way around, but it does so as it is burned, its hold over the man already sizzling and shriveling. The Son of God does not need to establish authority because that authority already exists. The demon, for its part, names him as a recognition of how things are ordered. Naming, beyond the simple act which terminates in syllables, is establishing the relationship between (things). I believe that my love of naming things is, deeply, a desire to know who is who and what is what. Does that mean that I have an overwhelming need to find order — a disordered desire for order? Is it well-ordered? I am swimming in the dark> about those questions for now.

Lance Mountain wasn’t even one of my favorite skateboarders. I had some names under my belt from among the pantheon of pro skaters. I was not really a disciple of any of them, but I liked to know their names. Tony Hawk, whose flat and heavy deck was my first. Ray Barbee, Christian Hosoi, Mike McGill, Lance Mountain. I tried to keep up with Jason, but he was memorizing names faster than I was.

One Saturday morning, after my walk home from Pete’s house, showing up to take care of Houdini and to be there in the homestead while my mother was delivering mail for the day, I walked into the garage and saw Lance stuck in the fence near the top. I didn’t know how in the world that happened. I mean, picturing it in my mind now, it’s quite obvious he used the — I don’t know what are they? Rungs? Courses? The horizontal wires of the fence like rungs of a ladder to climb up. The pattern was more narrow at the bottom and more open near the top. If you couldn’t escape where you were just keep climbing. It’ll take more exertion to get there but it will pay off eventually. Just climb high enough. Otherwise, if you don’t do that work, you’re stuck anyway. Anyway, what a puppy. I wish I knew how cute it was back then but it took a day to be fond about it. First, I was angry and scared. Angry because he was being what I only knew how to call “bad”, not obeying the rules (well, really, my expectations and wants). Scared because I had a few cats hit by cars on Circle Shore Road and he could have gotten out and gotten himself killed. He got out a few times like this. My mom and I were both baffled how he was escaping, thinking maybe the fence was loose and push-able at the bottom. I eventually caught him in the act of climbing. And then there was another time, not long after that, where he somehow got off of his leash. I don’t remember if the ring was missing on his collar or his collar had slipped off. I don’t know what it was, but I do know that my mom was as surprised as I was and couldn’t figure out how he got loose.

I also don’t remember when I learned about Harry Houdini, but the name came quickly. In fact, despite my meanderings about naming things, I don’t actually know whether I picked the name or my mom suggested it. I don’t have any idea. I don’t know whether your memory is like this or not — I mean I don’t think I’m at all alone or special — I just don’t know how — Is there a typical kind of memory? I’m not being rhetorical and definitely not assuming that there isn’t. There has to be. So many statements about “everybody has their own…” No, no, no, we are mostly garden variety — and don’t so many of us say, “I don’t know why I remember some of the things I do and don’t remember some of the things I don’t”? Stretching back into my own life, my very own life, the only thing I’ve ever really had — the one thing I have for all the time that I’m alive is what’s happening inside of me. This collection, this composite, this soul. And there are so many things I don’t even know about it. It almost feels like the primary function Houdini serves or has served, maybe the present participle was correct, inside of me is as a gathering point for just how much I don’t know about my own life. I escape me. If only I could be as skilled as that dog at climbing up and out — not out of me, but out of ignorance about me. Do you ever feel that?

I meant, Lance became Houdini.

One other thing I remember about Houdini is taking him to dog obedience classes. My mother made me promise that I would be really good about it, really get it right, really be devout, really make sure that this dog was obedient. Like so many things in life, I half-assed it. So many things in my history. I never really followed through. And I can’t say I really even had a relationship with that dog. Not much. I remember loving on him and petting him and enjoying the way he met some of my need to be affectionate, and how he gave me a sense of companionship. It sounds terrible to say but I think that it’s honest: I made use of him.

How much of a relationship do we really have with an animal? How much of that is naming? I don’t know this either. It is really an expanding list.

Houdini, the escape artist, trying to get out to come find me. His own engagement in the action of naming. And here I am, wondering aloud into a voice recorder about who he was and how he got here.

I know where he went eventually, though. To an actual farm in an actual up north. One of my cousins even stopped by and saw him and gave me an update. And I wonder whether those farmers kept the name I gave him.