New Skete Monasteries News

  By Ida Williams     With over 12 years of assisting the dog training program with paperwork and administration, I have seen some unique and fun dog names.     Occasionally, I will ask the owner how they came to name their dog.   Some say it was in memory of a past canine companion. Some say their kids named their dogs, mostly the dogs named after foods.   Most say it was because their puppy looked like the name.   I pulled a query on the last couple of years of dog training applications and then grouped the names into different categories.   Maybe these will help you when searching for your next pup’s name.   Funny Names   Gus From Accounting has to be my favorite name.   I would tell my husband when leaving for work, “I will be working with Gus From Accounting today.”   Not so funny names but still make me laugh:   Mercy and Echo.   I imagine the owners standing in their backyards yelling “Mercy” or “Echo” and their neighbors wondering “What in the world?”

By Ralph Karow In last month’s article I started talking about prearranging a funeral service for my mother before all of her assets go to medical care. It’s a thought that didn’t occur to me when my father had a stroke and we had to attend to his assets. It’s comfortable for me to think of all the practical and logistical reasons for why that didn’t happen, but very uncomfortable for me to allow the possibility that I wasn’t yet ready to put together a funeral, vocationally speaking. Five years ago, a service for either of them would have been one of those “celebrations of life” in a catering hall, not a religious service in a church. But five years ago I did have a dream that my mother had passed away and I had given $3,000 to a group of nuns to hold a memorial service in the basement of my parish in Manhattan. It wasn’t the modern basement, but a stone basement with burial niches in the walls and long coarse wooden tables with benches rather than chairs—a scene that brought to m