Sometimes I think I'm really emotionally intuitive and other times, like today, I'm literally the stupidest person on earth.
Am exhausted from sudden travel for unexpected funera. Have not slept nearly enough the last few days. Am staying with my father's family which means zillions of relatives I barely know or outright dislike, trying to follow conversation in a dialect I don't understand, or else standing awkwardly in the doorways. Basically just my one cousin who deigns to speak English to me, plus her 6 month old and the puppy. The food is terrible I haven't seen a vegetable in 3 days. Have been running the funeral home/wake/funeral mass/cemetery rounds for the last 2 days and while my grief isn't as severe given we weren't close, it's still a horrible tragic death, there's a crying motherless 5 yr old, and I'm surrounded by people grieving in an already EXTREMELY messy family situation. My dad's cousin has managed to make fatphobic and homophobic jokes within 24 hrs. Also the Casual Racism of this entire branch of the family. Missing work unpaid, job interview prep, my fkin artist hasn't gotten back to me abt my tattoos.
Also me. Hey I wonder why I'm so on edge and exhausted???? A mystery I'll never solve
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You once said that Doc's dog is his most important tool. How did Doc get his dog? Is there a special story behind their meeting? Or his naming of his dog?
So!!
It's late 1949 and Doc is still not only working through the aftermath of '45, but he's trying to once again find his footing in the world after having spent the last several years working on the bomb at Los Alamos.
Circa '46, he and a few other scientists are recruited to work on a classified project straight after the war's end and Doc, cautious but hopeful, accepts, desperately in need of money, a change of environment, and a new creative outlet.
The job, unfortunately, does not pan out, doing more harm than good to Doc overall. He gets fired. In the interim, he decides that he's better off trying to work on his own and sort things out. Doc starts the first iteration of what will eventually become E. Brown Enterprises, 24-hour scientific services (more or less a front by '85, but he has actually gotten the odd job throughout the years) and works freelance as a mechanic, repairman, and fledgling engineer. He makes house calls, repairs faulty equipment, and even improves on some already existing designs to make the lives of the people who call upon him just a little bit better.
It works, for a time, but Doc is incredibly lonely, still dealing with the pangs of guilt. He has always wanted a dog—his father didn't allow pets growing up because they were noisy and messy; a hassle, really—and what with his young acceptance to university and his job as a professor straight after graduation which eventually led to his being snapped up for the Manhattan Project, the window simply was never there to allow him to get a dog.
But as he's reading the paper one night, there are ads from the local shelter listing various dogs up for adoption and he decides, finally, that this could be good for him. So Doc goes down there and adopts his very first dog, a Norfolk Terrier that he's named Copernicus. Copernicus is energetic, friendly, and took an almost immediate liking to Doc. There was simply no better choice.
He's always been partial to the idea of adopting a dog; whenever he got the chance to, he always told himself that he'd go to a shelter and pick out one of the lonely, abandoned dogs that were in need of good, loving homes. That, coupled with the fact that it was much more cost-effective to adopt a dog considering in '49, his father's fortune had not yet come to him, so he had only the money he earned up until that point working at CalTech and on the Manhattan Project, made it the obvious choice.
Doc's first dog, Copernicus, was adopted out of a need for a very specific kind of companionship at that point in his life. He needed a friend, the unconditional love and affection that a dog would give without judgment, as well as someone that would keep him going and remind him that things got better. Copernicus was someone Doc could focus his attentions on in a positive way and who kept Doc on a schedule, reminding him that it was time to eat, to go for walks, to just get up and out and about.
Two lonely, down on their luck souls. Yeah, there's a little bit of poetry in their meeting.
It just so happened that his canine companion(s) would prove invaluable help with his scientific endeavours as well, aiding him in the lab.
Regarding Doc's naming conventions for his dogs, since science and the brilliant scientific minds of the past (and present) have been big inspirations/role-models for Doc, it made sense to him that he name his dear companions after such incredible figures in history. At the time, he chose Copernicus because not only was Copernicus a very, for his time, out of the box thinker, so to speak, challenging the accepted view of the cosmos with his heliocentric theory that so branded him a heretic, but it was for this theory, the planets revolving around the sun, that there's also a deeper layer of meaning to the name, as now that Doc had a dog to care for, his life would essentially revolve around his canine companion, making sure he was well and happy.
Sun and planets, anyone?
Anyway, that trend just continued with all the dogs he'd rescue over the years. Edison was next, named so for the light that he would bring to Doc's life. He was also the first dog adopted in the Hill Valley area, as Copernicus was still alive at the time of Doc's father's passing and his return to Hill Valley to move into the Brown mansion. Following Edison was Einstein, aptly named for his breed and his long white hair. Sheepdogs are incredibly intelligent, as was one of his greatest heroes, Einstein, and so the name was perfect.
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