nicknaming my cat and other lessons on evolution

happy new year too :)

I’ve been calling my cat Smooch. Her name is Tofu (technically it’s Professor Tofu according to her medical records) but I find myself calling her by an affectionate nickname more often than her real name. 

She’ll be four years old soon, and at some point within the last two I started calling her Smushy. It was an easy fit because, well, she looks smushy. She’s soft and rounded and she goes floppy when you pick her up and she molds her warm muppet body to yours for afternoon naps and bedtime cuddles.

Being smushy.

At some point the -y was dropped and I called her Smush. “I love you, Smush!” “It’s bedtime, Smush!” It was a natural evolution from the original nickname, and removing the suffix, if anything, gave the name a sense of regalness and business acumen. Mr. Smushy sounds like a brand of children’s flushable wipes – Mr. Smush is a partner at a respectable mid-sized law firm.

I even started pronouncing it like “Smoosh” with an elongated O sound, refreshing the name once again, like a pop star shedding her public persona for a new album. The eras of Tofu, we could say.

After and between each evolution of the nicknames I wondered – How could I think of another evolution past this? We have so many more years together, and yet I’ll never come up with another evolution of this name. What else could there possibly be?

And once again I thought, there’s no way I could reach an evolution beyond Smoosh. That must be the final form of the game. Then “Smooch” came out of my mouth. 

Now I seem to only call her Smooch. And from the other side of the door, it seems the path was pretty evident – “sh” and “ch” aren’t too dissimilar, and smooch is even slang for kiss which adds another layer of affection to the name. It was right there all along.

This is also a way to say I wasn’t sure if I had anything to write anymore. At least for a while. Even this is almost barely a subject. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say. I thought, maybe it’ll come soon, maybe it’s gone forever, what is “it” anyway? 

But then I started calling my cat Smooch. And I got an urge to sit down and write about it. And I realized maybe “it” was actually sitting in the room with me right now.

I’m sat!

I can’t wait to know what I’ll be calling my cat in 10 years. I hope there are one thousand more evolutions after Smooch. I hope by the hundredth evolution the name becomes entirely unrecognizable from its early ancestors. I can’t be sure when these new words will become part of my everyday vocabulary, but I am certain they will eventually. 

Just when you think there isn’t anything left, you find some more. Just when you get used to calling your cat Smush, the word Smooch flies out of your mouth. You can’t fight evolution.