The story of Menix

We payed a visit to my parents this weekend. Every time I open the gate to drive the car into the yard, Menix, who lives in the kennel on the other side, gets up and wags his tail with joy. My parents adopted him a long time ago when they found this stubborn stray puppy breaking into their garden for the third time. It was a good match – they didn’t have a dog at the time, and he was looking for an owner.

And as for the name, well, that’s a whole other story.
When I was a kid, my grandpa had a dog that looked pretty much like this one: same size, black and white fur, similar personality.

For context, that was in the years following the anti-communist Revolution, when TVR, the national TV station, began broadcasting American movies. It was then that my uncle Gelu watched a few episodes of the Mannix series and started calling his dog after the main character, as he thought he had the nose of a detective. 😀

I’ve got so many memories of that dog from my childhood, and when my parents saw how much this one looked like him, they instantly thought of the same name. As no one, except me and Gelu, still knows where his name came from, everyone is using the Romanian phonetic spelling, “Menix”.