I Labeled My Dog

The label maker still worked. That was all I was trying to find out.

It had been sitting out on the couch — I was going to take it to work — and one day I was sitting next to it and figured I’d test it. Like anyone with a label maker, I had to print something. So the first thing that came to mind was my dog’s name. Macie. The strip curled out, white, the plain kind I use on server racks and parts bins. It printed fine. Good.

And then, because it seemed funny, I stuck it on her forehead.

What happened next I didn’t expect. I looked at her standing there with “MACIE” across her head, and something shifted. For a second she wasn’t Macie. She was an object named Macie. The label had done to her what it does to a server — filed her, catalogued her, moved her into the bin of things I manage. The word crowded out the actual dog. I was looking at inventory.

It unsettled me a little. I label things so they’ll sit still in a system I run, and Macie is the opposite of that — a whole other being I don’t control, I’m just lucky to be in her life. The sticker collided those two worlds.

But instead of peeling it off, I got curious. I left it on. And all day I watched her flip back and forth — one second my dog, the next a labeled piece of equipment wandering through the kitchen. It was genuinely funny, this dog going about her evening tagged like a parts bin, with no idea she’d been filed. It fell off on its own sometime that night.

Later I realized it wasn’t the labeling that did it. It was which label. That plain white one carries its whole world with it — parts bins, equipment, utility. Her name tag says the same word and does the opposite, because it comes from collars and vet visits and get-her-home-safe. The meaning was never in the word. It was in the frame the label dragged behind it.

And here’s what caught me off guard. At the time, the label on her head was mostly just funny. What I didn’t expect is how much writing this out — actually articulating it — has made me want to go find her and give her lots of affection.