The Pets of My Life

My life has been marked by the presence of pets, and these have been of the most familiar types to us here in America: cats and dogs.  In my early childhood, not long after my parents moved us into a house in  late 1960, they brought home a relatively old, gentle grey cat they named Tom.  Tom was the family pet until his death around 1963 or so.  Not long thereafter they took me and my sister to the humane society and we got two kittens, the grey/white-striped Tiger and the completely black Panther.  Although Tiger seemed to adjust well to life with us, Panther was a bit on the wild side...that one was eventually brought back.  Somewhere along the line, we picked up a giant of a cat we called Smoky...one day that cat just wandered off and never came back.  Tiger remained as our house pet through '64 and '65, but as we let our cats come and go as they pleased, Tiger became more and more estranged from us until we had given up on it coming back home.  In February 1966, my father brought home a cockapoo puppy we named Michelle, after the Beatles song that had been so popular the year before.  I think after that Tiger showed up once or twice more...and then never again.  Michelle began the era of pets we kept either indoors, in the fenced-in back yard, or on a leash.  She gradually became blind until the affliction was total.  But we all loved Michelle and she lived a long, happy life, born in 1965 and passing away in 1981...

It wasn't until after I was married a year when Melissa and I got our first pet together, a miniature poodle we named Taffy...after its color.  Taffy lived long, from 1987 to 2007, and it was sad at the end when she was finally put to sleep.  Cuddles, a dachshund/whatever mix, came along a little puppy in 1997 and also lived to 2007.  And then it was Freckles, another mixed-breed with some Australian shepherd in her, whom we got as a little puppy in 2005 and is still plodding along quite well.  Oh, I might as well also mention that our grown daughter has taken under her wings her own puppy...

In spite of the fact that I've had several pets in conjunction with the childhood and adult families I've been a part of, I have never decided, on my own initiative, that I myself needed or particularly wanted any of them.  It has always been others who seem to have desired the pets, and I was either a child without a say in the matter (although I liked the pets we got) or an adult who was accommodating others' feelings. That doesn't mean that I didn't bond to each cat or dog: I did, and loved them as members of the family, past and present.  But during those eight years when I was completely on my own as a single, I never once had the remotest desire to get a pet.  To me, they're nice to have in the context of a family, but I'm fine without them, too...