baby wayne

I recently spotted this in the New Yorker.

“A crafty coyote…led the law on a two-day chase through Central Park before he was brought down yesterday by a sharp shooter with a tranquilizer gun…The coyote [was] nicknamed Hal because he was spotted near the Hallett Nature Sanctuary… “This is New York, and I would suggest that the coyote may have had more problems than the rest of us,” Mayor Bloomberg said. The News, March 23rd.

Nobody knows how Hal got into Central Park. But he wasn’t the first. A coyote was found there in 1999…Otis, the coyote captured in Central Park in 1999, was brought to the Queens Zoo where he still lives. The News, March 24th.”

And this, from Otis the coyote himself.

“In Queens I really have quite a free schedule, between feedings, and pacing back and forth, which I don’t really have to do but I do it anyway, because the little kids seem to enjoy it, and I feel it is expected of me. One so-called biographical fact I will mention, just because I find it so damn aggravating, is that before I was here I did not have a name – not Otis, not anything – and I wish I didn’t have one now. It’s really not coyote-like. To have a name at all, that is, let alone Otis. I guess you’d probably have to be a coyote to know what I mean.”

It got me thinking about how our baby Wayne came to be our baby Otis.

We found choosing a name the hardest thing in the lead up to having a baby. We had a number of loose criteria. Something unusual, but not so unusual as to invite school yard taunting. Not John, or Nicholas, but not Eldrich or Afternoon or Kool. Something without unintended Hollywood associations. Something that sounded ok with my surname, so not Torrence, or Laurie. Something our families could be ok with.

We arrived at the hospital with a shortlist – 5 girls names and 5 boys names. People told me that once he was born, he would look like a particular name, or there would be one on our list that seemed to suit him best. He didn’t. There wasn’t.

And so in his first days of life Otis was known as Wayne, our in-utero name for him, after the great champions of the North Melbourne Football C lub – Schimmelbusch – Schwass – Carey. And then on his third day we called him Otis.

We get a lot of questions about his name. Is he named after Otis Redding? Otis – like the elevators? Will you name your next child Milo? For the record – No, No, and No.

Sometimes I look at him and wonder did we choose well? And then I look at him and think that every day he grows a little bit more into the name that we have given him, and hope that when he grows up he won’t change his name in adolescence, to Steel, or Oberon, or Maurice.

Otis (m). English name first derived via the German Otto from the old German Ot (riches) – or alternatively from the Greek for ‘keen-eared’. As a first name it is rare outside the USA, where its use was promoted by James Otis (1725 – 83), a hero of the American War of Independence. It has been bestowed occasionally upon girls as well as boys. Notable bearers of the name have included US actor Otis Skinner (1858 – 1942) and US soul singer Otis Redding (1941-67). The Penguin Dictionary of First Names, 2004.