When I was little and had yet to graduate to the joys of dog ownership, I had three cats in a row: One that belonged to my mom while my parents were still together, and two more that were nominally mine.
The first was a grey cat named Pooka. Pooka was a kind, innocent little cat who would try to come into my bed at night. My father would charge in, scoop up the cat; a few moments later, through the door into the hall, I would see poor Pooka fly down the stairs in mid-air. I hoped he landed on his feet; I never knew. I became allergic, and my father sent Pooka off to live with family friends. I’m not allergic to cats an as adult and I’ve always wondered if my father was wrong. Pooka caught distemper and died; my mother said that really, he died of grief from being sent away from her.
I picked the next two cats. The first was a pure-bred siamese cat that I named Astro, after the pet dog in The Jetsons. He was loud but affectionate and I adored him.
This is how you kept a cat back circa 1979. You fed it, gave it a litter-box, and in the morning you let it out and in the evening you called it back in. Sometimes it came home; sometimes it didn’t. If you were extra-responsible you had it neutered so it wouldn’t embarrass you or threaten your pocket-book. What it did during the day was its business and, seeing how cats have such a private, familiar, and chummy relationship with death in both the giving and receiving of it, that probably suited it just fine.
One day Astro never came back. We looked and looked. Either he got killed by a car or a dog, or someone cat-napped him.
The next cat was mixed – a tabby kitten with Siamese ancestry. It was a tabby with a massive voice, and it never stopped meowing. I named him Astro the Second.
I don’t remember liking it, but I’m sure I did. He was nice to me during the day, but at night he would silently creep into my room, slink under the covers, and claw my bare legs. He would hiss and scratch my arm when I tried to stop him, and I would give up and cry myself to sleep. He grew bigger and bigger, and his body became rangy and confident; his attractive tabby stripes grew wider and starker and soon he looked somewhat like a miniature tiger.
Like his predecessor, he liked to wander and disappear all day. Like his predecessor, one day he never came back. As before I looked and looked, but he was gone.
Several months later, we found him near my mother’s apartment. If anything, he seemed even bigger and more tigery than when he had lived inside. He looked more like a native wild cat from a temperate forest than something descended from generations of house cats.
My mother, being female and thus predisposed to helping, to cleaning up the messes of people like my dad and me, volunteered to take him in to her place. We bought the proper equipment: the food and water bowls, the litter box, even a little box with bedding that would please a domestic cat.
Only he wasn’t domestic, not any more. The months of living on his own, of defending his turf, had left him edgy and paranoid, and when we took him inside he hunched down next to the wall and made this crazy growl: waaaah-waaaagh! We tried it for a few days, but we both had trouble sleeping with Astro in the house. We were afraid that whatever had kept him alive would try to get us when we slept. He wasn’t the same cat anymore, and perhaps he had never been the cat I had thought he was.
When we let him outside for good, he went without looking back over his shoulder. Not once. We never saw him again, and I imagine the cat’s old buddy Death paid a visit to Astro and told him there was a position open in his squad for an ambitious and stripy bruiser like himself.
A year or two later, my mother brought an nearly full-grown Old English Sheepdog to the door, and that was when I knew I liked dogs. I’ve been that way ever since.
In the age of the Internet, the cat has become an avatar and an odd and ironic pagan goddess to millions. But when I was young they were these peculiar dark passengers that stayed with us for a while before leaving for other lands or other spheres of being. I won’t forget my two pets, nor the grieve-stricken little grey cat that came before, but I’ll always prefer dogs. My present dog sleeps soundly not four feet away as I type this. He’s a big black mongrel, and he’s old. He once spent the day off-leash on my front porch because I’d unwittingly locked him out, and he never ran away.
My two boys are animal lovers too. One is resolutely a dog person and will be all his life, while my oldest is a skinny, energetic, and moody kid who, I’m guessing, would love to share space with a temperamental creature much like himself.
Whichever pet they pick, I hope their choice is in harmony with their respective spirits. I hope they learn to love and respect animals, and understand them better then I did at that age.
EDIT – some commenters thought the photos were of the two cats mentioned in this post. They are not; they are merely representative of those cats and look very much like them. There are photos of these cats, but those photos are physical, not digital, and are trapped in photo albums (remember those) on the other side of the continent. But these photos look very much like those original cats.
EDIT – some commenters thought the photos were of the two cats mentioned in this post. They are not; they are merely representative of those cats and look very much like them. There are photos of these cats, but those photos are physical, not digital, and are trapped in photo albums (remember those) on the other side of the continent. But these photos look very much like those original cats.
