Eric the Cat

The first pet I remember having was a family cat. We go her from a shelter and named her Sparky. I really don’t remember much about Sparky except that she was a tabby and likes to chase strings. She slept with my parents mostly. They gave her to me at bedtime once but I kept giggling at her walking over me so that ended that. We gave her away when we left Arizona for Hawaii.

Once in Hawaii we got a kitten from a litter. Waldo was a grey tabby with a stubbed tail. I don’t remember where he slept. My main memory of Waldo is my mom poking his nose into the cat mess he made exclaiming that he was a naughty little kitty. One day Waldo was gone. I never had the chance to become terribly attached to him. But that was what sometimes happened with indoor/outdoor cats.

It was a few years before we got Sublease. She was already middle aged and wise. Sublease was a brown tabby and a cat’s cat. She slept where she wanted and became the queen of the house. One of her favorite places was on the hood of our car in the carport. But she wasn’t shy and became by confidant it the times I felt like I had no other friends. Sublease died of old age. In the time we had her two more kittens showed up at our house. One of them was still with us and bore the name, Kitten.

We moved from Lahaina to Wahiawa in 1988 and took Kitten with us. The cargo compartment of a Dehavolend-7 airplane is behind the passenger cabin. We could hear kitten yowling above the propeller engines all the way to Honolulu. Kitten lived with us for two more years and disappeared when I left Oahu to move back to Maui.

When I lived in a bachelor pad there was a cat that came around we named Mooch. I fed him meat in the morning and when he was still alive in the evening had some of the meat for supper. When Prajna and I were married we named our first cat Frank. Prajna liked the name and I did not. I named the cat Frank so none of our kids would ever have that name. Frank disappeared along with Jem and Scout years later. We also had a ginger tom come around sometimes that Naomi called Linda.

When our family lived on Wildwood Canyon Road in Yucaipa we had pet Rats. They were the first pets I ever had that weren’t cats. Then Mike showed up at our door one rainy night and we went through a lot of cats over the next decade. I also owned a dog for the first time. The dog we have now we’ve had about 5 years. Mike lasted a long time but the only cat we still have from that house is Pumpkin.

Now as I write this there is a 5 week old kitten on my lap. Some friends gave him to us. I gave him some breakfast and he used his box right away. He was being very playful for a while. Then he managed to get into the fireplace and needed a bath. He’s very subdued now and looks like he’s going to sleep. I do like dogs but I’m definitely a cat person. He followed me around the house this morning. That delighted me.