No Lizards or Rodents, Please

Daily writing prompt

If you could have something named after you, what would it be?

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I once had a chameleon named after me. Janice.

She was my daughter’s pet. Not beloved but liked well enough. Janice lived in my daughter’s bedroom on the third floor. Frequently, during the winter, my daughter complained heartily about how cold it was in her room. We had a lot of problems with heat in the house at that point as well as financial challenges which kept the heat turned down to a sometimes astonishingly low number.

“Put on another sweater” was our frequent response to complaints about the cold. But that wasn’t feasible for little Janice who did eventually succumb, though we were never sure it was because of the cold. Janice’s corpse was kept in a pencil box on the top shelf in the back hall leading to the basement until the earth became thawed enough to bury her in the front yard under a bush.

Later, my daughter had a hamster. In the winter, the hamster would stop moving and we’d think it was dead, but my daughter said it had started to hibernate because of the cold. So, then she put the hamster on a heating pad and the hamster came to life. The hamster, whose name I can’t remember, lasted for a while, through a winter or two, but then we went all in on dogs.

I wouldn’t mind if someone named a really great looking and friendly dog after me – not Janice, but maybe J or JJ, a gender-neutral name. A dog with a thick coat who wouldn’t be bothered by winter or a cold house. That would be swell.