MCCANNTA is the nickname which I received while a student at Biola University, my illustrious alma mater. More precisely, mccannta was my username on the school computer system (an old VAX). The naming convention used by the data processing department to determine how usernames were created was a student's lastname + first initial + middle initial + an ordinal (if necessary for duplicates). Thus:
McCann + (T)homas + (A)nthony = McCannTA
Before you write me off as a dorky computer geek, let me assure you of two things: first, this is not a computer operations manual, it's a story; second, we did not refer to one another by our usernames. Besides being totally moronic, it would violate the fundamental rules of nicknames. You cannot just adopt a nickname yourself, it must be given to you. It takes more than coincidence to impart a nickname to someone. The coincidence of the naming convention and me being a Computer Science major was not enough to galvanize mccannta for me; that took the help of Kevin Costner and a stray kitten.
Dances With Wolves opened the fall of my freshman year at Biola. If you remember from the movie, "Tatanka" is the Indian name for buffalo. I loved the movie, as I do even now, and saw it with all my friends. It was the movie and the cool Indian name for buffalo that served as inspiration for my friends (Jeremy Jones, Ben & Matt Wooley, Eric Liljenstolpe) and I to use it to name a stray kitten we took in.
Biola is a private Christian school and sorta strict; no curfews, but a kitten living in our dormroom at the end of Sigma 2nd-long would not have been appreciated. That the RA (Rob Wilshire, if I remember correctly) never found us out was due in greater part to his lack of investigative skills and less to our deft hiding abilities. As I look back, we had little to worry about. How was it that he either never noticed or failed to ask why Jeremy always had plenty of Motel6 soaps by his sink or why he had a 4-foot long steel undersea harpoon in his room and why our furniture was riddled with holes?
We named him Tatanka (him?-I don't know, it's so hard to tell with cats). One particular day, Jeff Chism was in our room playing with the kitten. Jeff grew up in Oregon and had the heart of a cowboy. Jeff was crawling around, chasing the kitten around the room. He was mimicking Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves where he first meets the Indians. With neither Costner nor the Indians able to understand each another’s language, Costner is trying to ask if they have seen any buffalo by acting it out, kinda like charades. He is on all fours, grunting while moving around in a circle. To mimic the horns of the buffalo, imagine someone making the “quote-unquote” hand gesture while holding their hands against the sides of their head. The Indians look perplexed but finally see what he is trying to describe and say “Aaaaahh, Tatanka,” to which Costner replies, “Tatanka, Tatanka, yes…buffalo…buffalo.”
Paying homage to the movie, Jeff is doing the same scene with the kitten; chasing him around grunting and saying “Aaahhhh, Tatanka.” After a bit, he realizes that ‘mccannta’ sounds similar to ‘Tatanka.’ This prompts a change in the kitten chasing pantomime: he now alternating his hands being horns saying “Aaahhh, Tatanka” with having his hands out in front of him acting like is typing on a keyboard saying “Aaahhhh mccannta.” Jeff is a pretty reserved guy (he is now a pilot in the U. S. Navy) so to see him behave like this was so out of character, so strange. It would be as odd as if you saw Prince Charles acting this out. It was hysterical and we couldn't’t believe it, the nickname has been with me ever since.
It's odd, but for the most part, I have never been a fan of nicknames; I rarely use them for others. It has always seemed rather trite and sorta fake; a feigning public attempt at relational chummy-ness, unwelcome except from closest of friends. However, I have been ‘mccannta’ since freshman year; it just seems to be who I am, thus my namesake website.
We had Tatanka the last half of spring semester. The semester came to a close, summer was coming and I had to leave the cozy confines of Biola in southern California. I brought him with me. We packed my ’86 Ford Escort, sans 
air-conditioning, for a homeward-bound road trip: we braved the desert of the southwest, slowly climbed the mountains of the Rockies, and kept each other amused through the Great Plains all the way home, to the Gateway to the West, St. Louis, Missouri. He rode balanced on my headrest and shoulder for a good part of the way. A great balancer, I remember him digging his claws into my shoulder to steady himself while accelerating or braking.
We were home less than a week before he ran away.
