I come from a long line of family pets. Hamsters, turtles, gerbils, cats, dogs….we have had them all at one time or another.
When I was born my parents had acquired a two year old boxer named ‘Duke.’ He would eat grapes with my very pregnant mother, was tall enough to hang his head over the edge of my bassinet while he was sitting, would howl along with me as I suffered bouts of gassy tummy and would patiently situate himself along the edge of the blanket I was closest to when I was on the floor. Family lore has a tale about Duke refusing to move from the edge of our rain ditch when I was lost one day. My angry mother was trying to get him to find me and when she stalked out to where he was sitting, I was happily playing in the grass in the ditch out of my mother’s sight. I might have been three? And then there was the former paper boy who came back to visit Duke when he was home on furlough one time. Apparently our dog would meet him at the corner and follow him on his paper route every day. For years.
Duke developed a brain tumor and had to be put to sleep when it was determined that his seizures could not be medically controlled and made him dangerous to be around.
After Duke came Ripper Roar, another boxer whose exuberant and errant ways made it difficult for my aunt and uncle to deal with him so he was given to us. And then Buffy – an apricot poodle my sister received for her 8th birthday. Buffy was swept off the porch by a screen door and broke a leg before she was a year old and then had four little black poodle puppies about a year later. We found homes for Jeremy and Jason and Candy. Bridget joined our family. She was the tiniest, blackest, most trusting little poodle ever. We played terrible – but never unsafe – games with her and she repayed us by enjoying every single minute of the attention. She loved retreiving frisbees. It was especially fun to throw them across the lawn on a windy day because she would trip across the grass on tippy toes, pick up the frisbee and bound back. If the wind caught the frisbee just right, it would flip the poor little dog head over heels into the air. Bridget adored my mother and if she was laying down somewhere, chances are Bridget was somewhere on her person….or behind her knees. Those poodles put up with a lot. Even life with the pet skunk my sister bought.
Skunks are wonderfully affectionate pets. Ours was leash trained, ate dog food and used a kitty litter box. Descented, they stomp their adversaries into corners. This one found a wonderful adversary in my mother. It never failed. Mom would walk in from work and ol’ Seymour would have her backed fearfully into a corner in no time – screaming for someone to come and help her. Heh. He would crawl up onto a living room chair and settle himself to sleep between the two poodles. Adorable sight. I know we have pictures somewhere. Just can’t find them.
The day came when Seymour was playing with Bridget and she was howling as the skunk dragged her across the room by the leg. The skunk had gotten bigger than the poodle. One or the other had to go. Since the poodles were there longer, the skunk moved into a home with a family that had never had a pet before. He lived a good long life with them. And they eventually bought another skunk.
But poodles eventually get old and creaky and incontinent and uncomfortable. They needed to be put to sleep. Along came Quimby – a setter cross dog that I got from a family friend when I graduated from college. She was big and white and loving and terribly trained. If she got out of our fenced back yard she would chase cars in the road, move just a bit a head of them and then abruptly turn into the front wheels. She was lucky she was never killed.
Since I was living in a bedroom created in our unattached garage, I also had a steady stream of cats to deal with any field mice. The most memorable was the one that began life as ‘Daisy’ or ‘Lilac’ or ‘Rosebud.’ I had her for about two weeks and took her to the vet to be spayed. We went for a preliminary visit and I dropped her off the next morning. When I went to pick her up at the end of the day I was met by the vet. She reamed me out because of the number of fleas on my thickly furred cat but also wanted to know WHO had told me it was a female. She scowled at me and walked out of the room when I told her that SHE had checked it over the day before. Apparently, they had the cat on the table and surgically opened up to spay her when they discovered that Daisy/Lilac/Rosebud was in fact, male. I paid for the surgery and left with my cat – who I decided needed to be ‘defemanized’ and renamed her/him ‘Rambo.’
My dad is not a cat person per se but he liked Rambo. Alot. The cat would follow him everywhere around the yard to watch what he was doing. Rambo and Quimby had a special affection for one another as well.
Both Rambo and Quimby were gone by the time I married. Kidney disease and heart worm. We lived in an apartment and got a cat. A seal point Himilayan named ‘Oscar.’ What a sweetheart. He enjoyed our Christmas trees and never managed to knock them down. He would eat the tinsel and curling ribbon which would trail out of his behind. Ew.
We moved to our current home and Oscar came along. We adopted the Prince and Oscar adored him. Then one day he bit me. The baby was crying and he came out from under the bed and bit my shin. Hard. Okay. So the crying baby upset him. We took extra care to keep him away. And then I caught the cat stalking my toddler. He would hide around corners and wait. The cat had to go.
When the Prince was almost four we purchased a pug. HRH had seen one at a neighborhood dog show and decided he wanted one. And that the Prince needed a pet to take care of. Riiiight.
Pugs are very cute. When they are puppies. This pug – ‘Gracie’ – adored me. Absolutely adored me. If I was sitting anywhere, she was in my lap. If I was cooking, she would sit at my feet, tonuge hanging out waiting for attention. If I was in the bathroom, she would curl up inside the slacks around my ankles. She sneezed and snorted in your face. She had to be kept cool at all times. I couldn’t figure out why she was so attached to me. My brother in law delightedly told me she recognized me as the ‘pack leader’ in our home. Yeah. Right.
During the time we had Gracie and Oscar, we also had Winkie – a chinchilla who lived in my classroom during the school year, Snooky – an iguana who also lived in my classroom until the salmonella scare and Twitter, a beautiful grey cockatiel. Winkie would also go camping with us and is buried under a tree at a county park after suffering heat stroke. He was six.
Twitter was a hoot. I clipped his nails one day and he slipped off my shoulder while trying to land. He fell on the linoleum floor and broke his vent. The vet told us ‘he’ would never lay eggs again. Surprise to us as Twitter had never laid an egg before this. Imagine our surprise about six months late to find an egg in the bottom of the bird cage. And it happened three more times. One spring day he tired to land on the ceiling fan – something he had done all winter long when it was not going. It was like a cartoon. There was a poof of feathers and a bird fell to the floor with a clunk. His broken leg was repaired with a plastic splint and he never tried the ceiling fan thing again.
Twitter and Snooky died on the very same day. It was also the day HRH checked and replaced all the battieres in our carbon monoxide detectors.
When she was seven, the Princess decided she wanted a pet of her own. We promised she could get one for her birthday. She couldn’t decide between a cat and a dachsund. Or a turtle. I nixed the snake.
We went back and forth and back and forth. Then I saw a picture and an ad one of the teachers hung on the board at school. There was a cat in the barn where she stabled her horse that was ‘too sweet’ to be a barn cat. It reminded her of a former pet and she couldn’t take it because of allergies. We went to the barn to see it. It was a stray and about two years old. My friend had already taken him to the vet to be neutered. He was ‘free to a good home.’ We went home and talked about it, gathered up cat supplies and brought him home. His name is Shadow.
Now about nine years old, this cat is a hoot. He has little hiding places all over the house, meanders out on a regular basis to check the activities of the home and get some affection. He finds his way to my bedroom in the ealry morning when he knows I am working on my laptop and curls up next to the exhaust vent. It blows out warm air. He also loves to bat a paw at the moving icon on the screen. He will sit for hours watching fish on a fish tank. Yesterday, when we were cleaning and refilling the 50 galloon fish tank that has been inoperational for the past year, he sat and watched all of the activity. Now he is curled up in a computer chair watching the tiger mollies and platys and painted tetra that we bought today. Life is good for Shadow. Really good.
When we had to have Gracie put to sleep four years ago when she developed kidney failure, Shadow kind of filled a void for all of us. But he missed Gracie too. I didn’t really get that message though. Not till later.
I was worried because the cat would wake me up at night now and then. He would be curled around my head on the pillow and would bite me. Really bite me. Hard. On the scalp in the middle of the night. I wasn’t sure what was going on but I had other things distracting me. My mom was in the hospital in another state. I was trying to close out a school year, do report cards and pack up my classroom. A biting cat was the least of my worries. I told HRH to make a decision about him while we were taking care of my mom.
During the seven weeks we spent taking car eof my mother in another state my kids were pining for another dog. We checked the local flea market every time we went for available small dogs. We were hoping to find a cheap brown chihuahua that we could name ‘Tater Tot.’ We learned that cheap and chihuahua cannot be found together in one place.
On our way home we stopped at my sister’s house. We were cajoled into driving by the house of my neice’s youth pastor. Who just happened to have puppies and one that needed a home. They said it was a chihuahua. Riiiight.
So we came home with a white and tan chihuahua terrier mix. We named him ‘Tater.’ He didn’t take to riding in the car and vomited several times during that 13 hour drive home. We sat him on the carpet when we arrived and he was immediately sniffed out by the cat. Shadow. Who was glad to have a play buddy again. And who has never bitten anyone again.
And boy do they play. They chase each other through the house. Back and forth. They curl up together and take turns grooming and cleaning each other’s faces. They sniff out each others treats. And they alternate the beds they sleep in. If Tater is with the Prince, Shadow is with the Princess….and vice versa. But I usually wake up to find one or the other in our bed. Until the laptop hums. Then the cat is curled next to me. And the warm air blowing exhaust fan.
Life is good for Shadow. Really, really good.
I think I want to be a cat.
