What's in a name?

When I was a child, I read the collie books by Albert Payson Terhune. They fired my imagination, and I remember really, really wanting a collie. I spent one summer with an imaginary collie, and he went with me on a vacation to my Grandmother's house. I wrote stories about collies - stories that I still have. One was called Flame, and he had quite a few adventures with his young mistress.

When I turned 13, my parents agreed to get me a real collie. I took him to dog obedience classes, and my love for training dogs was born.

I named that collie Deepfork's Golden Gladiator. The Golden part referred to his golden coat color. The Gladiator part referred to his very famous grandfather, Ch. Tartanside the Gladiator. But it was the Deepfork's part that was so special to me as a child.

As a child, I dreamed of owning a kennel of collies - just like Albert Payson Terhune did at Sunnybank. My kennels, I decided, would be called Deepfork Kennels, named after the headwaters of the Deepfork River that ran behind my parents' suburban home. I picked out names for my future collies. I remember Deepfork's Indigo Iris as one name for a dreamed of blue-merle collie.

Terhune's Sunnybank was a beautiful estate on a country lake. My Deepfork's was named after a dirty suburban creek, but I spent happy hour after hour as a child playing on the banks of the tree-lined creek. I ignored the pollution that city streams tend to collect. To my childhood eyes, it was a fantastic body of water, just as glamorous as Sunnybank.

As I grew up, I realized that having a kennel of collies in suburban Oklahoma City wasn't going to happen. But the seeds of the dream never left me.

Twenty-five years later I rescued my American Eskimo from an animal shelter, I took her registration papers and renamed her. She became Laika of Deepfork. Even though I lived in Kansas City, far from the headwaters of the Deepfork River, I wanted to give a nod to my childhood dream of a kennel of beautiful dogs.

Life has a way of turning in directions we never intended. A few years after obtaining Laika, I found myself moving into a house down the street from my childhood home. I am again living feet away from the headwaters of the Deepfork River, although now it is a cement ravine.

I soon purchased another dog - a sheltie - who I named Deepfork's Aslan. Two years later, I purchased Deepfork's Battle of Jericho, another sheltie. Now, Deepfork's - although not a true breeding kennel - is a reality. Four of the Deepfork's dogs have performance titles, and two are showing heavily on the agility and rally obedience circuit. I have traded in collies for smaller shelties, but the spirit of the childhood dream lives on.

It's a sweet thing to live long enough to see a childhood dream come true.