Although dogs will always be my favorite species, I’ve shared a home with many other critters over the years as well. Cats are one that I hold some mixed feelings about. My relationship with them varies from cat-to-cat, but as a kid, I very much wanted to be a cat person.
At a pretty young age, when my parents and I lived in a tiny apartment part-time and with my maternal grandparents part-time, I started asking for a pet. One of the requests went as follows:
Me: Can I get a kitten?
Mom: No, you can’t get a kitten right now.
Me: Well… what about two kittens?
Kid logic: you gotta love it, right?
Needless to say, no kittens came into my life at that time. My first pet, I think, was a hamster, just called, “Hamster.” No actual memory of Hamster exists in my mental catalog; I only know that s/he lived with us at some point in my young life at my grandparents’ house. We also had two parakeets in one of our early apartments, Murphy and Keegan. One of them was turquoise blue; the other, bright green. (I believe these were the substitute for the kitten I wasn’t able to acquire.) Perhaps my mom could tell you which one was which. I can’t. I just remember them being there for a time. The first pet I have real memories of would be my childhood dog, Ebony, adopted when I was two.
The first kitten I did get to bring home, Sandy, came from my dad’s law school friend’s family. I can’t remember how old I was when Sandy and I met (probably between the ages of 3 and 5), or how old I was when he disappeared, but I don’t believe he was with me more than a couple of years. All of our family cats when I was young were indoor/outdoor. That living arrangement, as you’ll learn, never worked out for us. I don’t know why we continued to allow our cats to spend unsupervised time outdoors for so many years. My dad was likely the one behind that, as he “wasn’t a cat person,” and that’s how all of the cats he and my mom grew up with lived.
Back to Sandy though… We spent a weekend visiting my dad’s friend, and I was in little kid heaven. They had backyard chickens. No one I had ever met had backyard chickens. I got to go out to the coop in the mornings with the other kids and collect fresh eggs for breakfast, which I thought was the greatest thing ever.
They also had kittens. I had not given up on getting a kitten by this point in my life. Someone managed to convince my dad that I should take one home with me. The family allowed me to pick any kitten I wanted. Sandy, a very pale orange tabby, was it. We rode home, cuddled together in the backseat of the family car.
At one point, while Sandy was still young, he disappeared for several days. I was heartbroken until I found who I thought was him. We realized we had the wrong cat when Sandy turned up in one of our large Oak trees out front a couple of days later. A neighbor kindly brought over a ladder and retrieved him for me, and I finally had my two kittens! Briefly. My dad said I could only keep one, so the impostor ended up going to live with another, older girl in the neighborhood.
Other than bringing Sandy home and his getting lost, I don’t have many specific memories of him. I did regularly dress him up in doll clothes and push him around the house in a little stroller. My mom used him in a couple of photo projects while she was getting her degree. Eventually, he stopped coming home from his days roaming the neighborhood. It seems that, in his free time, he visited many other families that offered him food. I searched for him, but found nothing other than that these other families hadn’t noticed him around anymore either. Several years after he vanished, I thought I saw him sitting in a driveway a couple of blocks away from our house. By then, if it was him, he obviously belonged to someone else. I had a new cat at home, and my family never pursued trying to get him back.
Until next time…
“A kitten is in the animal world what a rosebud is in the garden.” ~ Robert Southey
