coo-hoo-lin

I mentioned in my previous post that I was at my aunt and uncle's house for Easter Sunday, and they have a dog named Coohoolin (spelling in ?). I go to their house several times a year and I see this dog and wonder about his name, but have never asked, probably because I always think about it right before I get on the freeway on my way home.

I don't know how many times I thought I would email my Uncle Fred when I got home and ask, but it is a long drive and my mind wanders. It isn't anything important, don't even know why I'm writing about it really, except that it always makes me think of the book Angela's Ashes. In the book, Frank McCourt's dad would tell him a story about Cuchulain (pronounced coo-hoo-lin), the Hound of Cuchlain, the boy who accidentally killed a dog of that name, and took over the name and job as guard dog, and became a hero of Ireland. It is a great and wacky story, from a book that inspires oddly warm feelings in me, and for some reason makes me like their dog more, even if that isn't where they got the name from.

I like the book so much because like the book Rain of Gold (which I highly recommend), it reminds me of my family. The mother in both books was nuts, different kind of nuts, but both a bit, not really crazy, but colorful. Colorful is something there is a lot of in my family, and for a long time it embarrassed the hell out of me, but I've come to appreciate it more over the years. In the generation of my grandparents everyone was colorful, my Nana taught me how to drink like a lady one night, and would throw on her Reebok's and go chasing the cows, she married three men that were all related to each other, and had a boyfriend when she died that I think she didn't marry because he wasn't family (she always mentioned that none of them were related to her, only to each other).

My grandfather was quite the character himself, and our family is still very close to his mistress' granddaughter. Not to be undone, one of her sisters is a witch, although there could be no cooler witch than my Tia Nena, and she wouldn't curse family, after my Nana died they were driving back from her ranch in Mexico, and she started to worry crossing the border because they brought back goat cheese that she swore smelled like poo-ssy. That is just a brief overview of how colorful our family is, and that is just my mom's side, I have posted previously on some of my other grandmother's eccentricities.

This is turning into a really long post to say that I miss that kind of stuff in the rest of the world. It seems like the only colorful people there are these days are a dying breed, or characters in books. Everyone is trying so hard to be exactly the same, same hair, same body, same clothes, same PC jokes, we have gotten so afraid of offending someone or standing out that we have become flat out boring.

I saw a documentary recently that a friend recommended, called Home Movie (also think the doc. Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea has something to do with my current frame of mind), and it had the most eccentric people in it. I kind of wish more people would build their houses in trees or abandoned missile silos, but I guess who am I to talk, as I write this from my cookie cutter house in the Pardee development.

I sure got awfully wordy, just wondering about where a dog's name came from.