All Creatures, Regal and Ridiculous - Part I
I’m a cat person.
To be fair, I love all animals and have been the caretaker of a menagerie of dogs, cats, birds, fish, gerbils, hamsters, hermit crabs and such over the years, but my first pet was a giant, fluffy orange tabby cat named Simon (after Paul Simon, it was 1968 and I was seven years old with grown siblings). Simon was an exceptional cat. He was soft, cuddly, affectionate and gorgeous. He was also a wandering tomcat and prowled our neighborhood and surrounding fields for only a couple years before encountering a Central Texas rattlesnake.
Thinking back, this was probably my first psychic experience. I asked my mother if she knew where Simon was while, unbeknownst to me, my father was burying him in the backyard. They’d planned to break the news to me later in the day. I was devastated. I went to his favorite windowsill and found a tuft of orange fur which I kept in an album for many years.
A couple of dogs followed not long after Simon’s death. The first was a German Shepherd named Ginger. My brother’s dog had a litter of puppies and somehow, someone thought nine-year-old me was going to be able to handle a dog that would soon grow to outweigh me. It didn’t take long to disprove this theory and a more suitable new home was found for Ginger while we found a more suitable puppy. Sandy was a much smaller dog of indeterminate breeding who became my best friend. She was the one friend who saw me through a happy childhood and then a traumatic adolescence. She was with me when my father died and taught me about the ways dogs love us.
Sometime after Sandy settled in, a tiny and very fluffy grey tabby kitten showed up on the porch. Aside from his coloring, he was an exact replica of Simon, who had been prolific and left carbon copies of himself around the neighborhood. Without any notable discussion that I can remember, Simon the Second moved in. We made sure he couldn’t continue the family line; he kept closer to home and outlived his predecessor by many years. He stayed behind with my mom when I moved out on my own, content spend his golden years stretched out in the high den windowsill, the same spot that had belonged to his great-grandfather, watching the world go by.
It was a few years after I left home before I was grounded enough to look after a pet again. I was already looking after a small person, so take what you will from that, but one day another orange cat turned up on my mother's porch while I was visiting. This cat was short-haired and sleek with a long face and looked like a pumpkin-spice colored Siamese. According to his collar tag, his name was Frisky. I was able to track down his owner’s roommate through the veterinarian’s number on the tag, only to find his owner had given him away before relocating to another city. The roommate offered to take him back temporarily while she found another home for him, but I’ve always known that you don’t ‘get’ a cat. The cat finds you, and this one had. I brought him home with me.
Frisky was a free spirit, his own cat. He was an expert hunter, always trying to bring his catch inside. Sometimes he was successful and I once spent an entire afternoon pleading with him to retrieve the live mouse he’d snuck in when I wasn’t paying attention. He lost interest after the mouse ran under the refrigerator, and disappeared, as cats do. I managed to catch the mouse using a broom and a cup and relocated the exhausted and terrified creature to the woods at the edge of our neighborhood. I knew Frisky wouldn’t go looking for his mouse there because that was Mockingbird territory and after once losing a quarter-size patch of hair from the top of his head, he knew better than to get too close.
For a while, I lived out in the boondocks, near Stillhouse Hollow Reservoir on the edge of the Texas Hill Country. The A-Frame house I moved into had been vacant for several years and was home to a fairly large bat colony in the space between the high ceiling and roof. It was a sparsely populated wild area with tarantulas, lizards, scorpions and snakes everywhere, all the time. Frisky and the kids would sit on the deck every evening at dusk, just below where the bats dropped out of the roof, hoping to catch one. Every now and again he did (Frisky, not the kids – that I know of). I found a maimed or dead bat in the house on more than one occasion.
Frisky's last life ran out when he gambled with a rattlesnake one afternoon. The snake struck him in his stomach and there was nothing the vet could do to save him. It makes me sad all over again now, writing this. He was a very good cat.
Overlapping with Frisky was a Great Dane – Black Lab mix named ‘Blackie’ (this is what happens when you let your six-year-old name the puppy) and a Silky Terrier named Daisy (she came from the shelter with her name). Blackie was gorgeous and huge, as you can imagine, and Daisy was a pretty little dust-mop of a dog. Blackie was about two years old when I relocated from the boondocks by the lake (on two acres) to a subdivision near Houston with no yard to speak of. It wasn’t a great situation and not long after a co-worker of my husband (at the time) took Blackie to live on his ranchette. It was bittersweet but also the best possible outcome for all of us.
Daisy was fine living without a yard. She refused to walk on a leash, or go for a walk in general, but never strayed more than four feet away from me. She was terrified of thunderstorms, loud noises and as she got older, even rain. Her neurotic behavior became destructive over time. One afternoon, I left her outside in the double-fenced backyard (I’d moved by this time) while I ran an errand. The weather was perfect, there was food, water and a bed on the covered deck and she should have been safe and secure, but she escaped, and I never found her. She was nine years old (this is important later). She wouldn’t wear a collar, and this was before the days of microchipped pets, so I’ve always remained hopeful that someone found my pretty little dog and took her home with them because there was no way to know where she belonged.
The reason the yard was double fenced had a lot to do with Sandy. Sandy was a pedigreed Golden Labrador Retriever from the Rockefeller line of Labs. She also technically belonged to the Harris County Sheriff’s Department. Her K-9 handler was (at the time) my husband, and she was undoubtedly a better deputy than most of the cops in her unit. Sandy was trained to find drugs, money, guns, explosives, dead bodies… you name it, she could locate it. She proudly wore her badge on her harness and spent her days in a modified patrol car riding all over the county, answering calls with her handler. Her worst days were the ones when the patrol car left the driveway without her. On those days she was bereft, completely inconsolable. Sandy retired from active duty about the time her handler and I divorced. I wasn’t allowed to keep her, and he wasn’t able to, so she lived out her remaining years with another deputy and his family. Sandy taught me how much happier dogs are when they have a purpose.
After Sandy, I became a true empty nester. I was single, my daughter had moved out on her own and the only furry companionship I had was the feral cat that visited my backyard for food and shelter. I had her spayed so she wouldn’t contribute to the surplus population, but she was never my cat. I provided food and sometimes she’d let me pet her. I had a large, fenced backyard, lived in walkable neighborhood, and decided it was time to adopt a dog. I went to the shelter, envisioning a spaniel or a medium sized scruffy terrier companion who could walk with me in the evenings.
The dog I found was Pepe. He was a Silky Terrier, an exact replica of Daisy. He was almost ten years old when his owner left him at the shelter and he was my unfinished business. I figured he’d probably live another 4-5 years and I’d have paid whatever karmic debt I owed for not taking better care of Daisy. The universe has a sense of humor, however, because he lived to be 18 years old. And for most of those years, he was NOT easy to live with. He chased the vacuum cleaner, the lawn mower and any big truck that happened to pass by while on a walk. He tried to make a run for it every time the door opened, which usually ended with having to extract him from a tangled bush or muddy puddle. He also had extreme separation anxiety and licked the paint off the front door every time he was left alone. Crating him made matters even worse; he’d drool and chew and paw the crate until he was bloody. And he hated men. This wasn’t much of an issue until I remarried. He’d lay under the bed at night, growling and snapping whenever David tried to get into bed. They eventually came to an agreement, but Pepe continued to push boundaries until the very end (did I mention he lived to be 18 years old?). We made sure he lived his best second life with us, and my debt was paid in full.
A year or so before Pepe went on to his great reward, my daughter’s dog, Foster came to live with us. I could write an entire column about Foster and the imprint he’s left on the pets who rule our lives today, so I’ll leave it at this until next week: Foster was, simply, the Best Dog Ever.
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