My parents had four dogs over the years. Two pugs: Sotchie and her daughter, Fidget. We then got a purebred cat: a blue-cream Himalayan named Wakyweed's Lady Tamsyn of Thailand (yes, she had papers) and then came the two Boston Terriers: Nugget and Sassy.
When I was in the middle grades, I had a couple gerbils, Fred and George (and I should point out that this was decades before Ms. Rowling came along...think I could claim "prior art"?) and a black mouse, Kevin.
When I started living on my own, I had a cat, rescued from the pound for ten bucks. There were only a few cats up for adoption at the time, and there was a cold going around the cattery. A couple were sacked out from exhaustion. One had a vendetta against the world, growling and hissing when you approached the cage, and to see him, you could see why: A chunk had been taken out of his nose and ear. But the last one, even though he had the cold, summoned the strength to come up to the bars, shove his head against them, and meow plaintively: "Take me home! I don't like it here!" Good enough for me.
By the time I realized that his named was "Ivan" (from
Peter and the Wolf as Ivan the Cat wasn't that smart and neither was mine), we had been calling him "Cat" for so long that it stuck and I ended up respelling it "Qatt."
He was the Lenny of the cat world: Big, dumb, innocent. He was gigantic...20 pounds and not because he was fat but because he was huge. He could easily stand on his hind paws, put his front paws on the dining room table, and easily look to see what was there. Whenever I had to kennel him, I had to prove that he was, indeed, a regular cat and not a wild animal.
And he loved
everything. He loved you, he loved me, he loved linoleum. Stranger to the house? No problem: Flop down at your feet: I love you! Pet me! For those who say they hate cats because they're aloof, they never met Qatt. I couldn't go anywhere in the house without him following me. You'd think he was a dog. He came when he was called, he chased his tail, he played fetch. Now, he eventually realized he was a cat and give you the look of, "OK...I keep running down the hall to give this back to you...if you don't want it, I'm not going to keep getting it," but for a while, he was into it. But, it was easy to get him his exercise. I'd sit at one end of the place and a friend would sit at the other. "C'mere Qatt! C'mere!" and he'd come dashing along, expecting the scritching. "C'mere Qatt! C'mere!"...dashing to the other end of the place to get his attention over there.
I'd love to have a dog...a great big dog as opposed to a little one, but I don't have a life that would allow it. A dog needs a yard I don't have and more attention than I have to give after work and rehearsal.
Rrhain
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