Tracy posted a new feature in DykeWrite today, a section called “Pawprints” that will be about our pets. She asked these questions:
If you’ve ever lost a pet, was that loss as significant as losing a (human) loved one?
I don’t remember when we had to put our cat Dawn to sleep; I was eight and she was sixteen at the time. When my stepdad moved in with us from Indiana, we had to get rid of our cat Rainbow; I don’t remember what became of her but she was always standoffish anyway and not a great companion. The first cat I remember losing was Amaretto. We had gotten her from the humane society, but she had the awful habit of using our carpeted steps (right by the front door) as a litterbox. We tried so many things to keep her from doing it, and none of them worked. I’m still upset that my parents took her back to the shelter…I just can’t get over that one. She was so adorable, we’d gotten her when she was just a tiny kitten and she never got very big.

What do you think makes some people “animal lovers” and others indifferent?
I don’t know why some people are animal lovers and others aren’t. I’ve always loved my pets, so I don’t really know any other way to be. I’ve got a couple of friends who are allergic to cats, but even they love them - they just can’t pet them very long.

Has a pet ever adopted you?
The vast majority (though not all) of the cats I’ve lived with have adopted us. Before I was born, my mother had lace curtains in front of a sliding glass door, and one day she saw her gray cat Whisper waiting to come in, so she opened the door - but it wasn’t Whisper, it was Dawn, and she stayed. I think we got Rainbow when I was about two years old; if I recall my mother’s stories correctly the calico was hanging around our house and would eat food my mother put out, but even after we adopted her she never got very friendly. We used to say she was more decoration than a pet. While my dad was packing the U-Haul to move from Indiana, he had locked his cat Gus (a girl - short for Gesundheit) in his bedroom so he could leave the door propped open. During a trip inside, he noticed a little kitten eating Gus’s food. On the next trip, the kitten was drinking Gus’s water, and on the next trip the kitten was asleep on the couch. Nobody knew who owned the kitten, so my dad brought it along in the U-Haul’s cab with Gus. Our next two cats, Amaretto (”Ami”) and Friday, came from the humane society’s adoption center. I don’t have as many details on how my girlfriend got her cats, but I know Toadstool walked in off the street. Amanita was a stray who ate the food my girlfriend put outside for her, and after a while her son Truffle started coming too - he had been born feral. Although they were very shy at first, they eventually moved in. We got Agaricus from a lesbian couple who used to live down the street from my parents; he’s an orange tabby but his mother was the tiniest Siamese I’ve ever seen.

What lessons have you learned from them?
I learned a very important lesson from Dawn: how to crawl. From what my mother says, I would reach out and grab a fistful of cat (fur, skin, all of it) and haul myself up to her. She’d walk a little bit away, and I’d do it again.

What pet from childhood was your favorite?
I don’t know that I have a favorite - I love all my cats. Val is definitely the one I remember best, though; he would play with me before we got Friday. My parents never believed me that he would attack my toes as I came around a corner…until one day he finally did it to them. I also played chase with Val - my parents’ house is laid out so that you can go in a circle on the main floor, and we went around and around, trading off on who was chasing and who was running.

I have had pets other than cats, too. I felt terribly guilty when my gerbil died because I didn’t feed him (I seem to remember I was very sick and was on the couch downstairs, but I could be wrong) but he was never very healthy anyway - I know we’d taken him to the vet at least once. I had a hamster named François that my girlfriend had originally kept at work, and I was very sad when he died but relieved I wouldn’t have to clean the cage anymore. I buried him in our backyard next to the chinchillas’ grave. There are three chinches in there, two of whom I lived with. Mephistopheles was old and he hated me, but eventually he stopped jumping around the cage when I went to feed him, and then finally he just sat there all the time. I took him out to hold him one day, and cried while he sat on my chest breathing slowly. That night or the night after, he died. The other chinchilla was Kentucky, Mephy’s son. I don’t remember the circumstances of his death, except that I was mad at our housemate about it so maybe she didn’t feed him or something. He wasn’t as old as Mephy and shouldn’t have died. I’m still upset about that, too, like with Ami. We have also had frogs and fish but I haven’t had any great attachment to them, though I am always sad when they die.