Random Photo: A Kitten in Corvallis

As I looked through the photographs my father digitized, I came across this picture of my brother and me. I’ve seen it many times before, but this time I noticed my brother is holding a kitten. I’m pretty sure this is the cat we owned in Corvallis, Oregon. We don’t have many pictures of her, and most of the snapshots we have are of her when she was past the kitten stage.

The photograph brought back my memories of when we got her. One day, we were on a family picnic in a park somewhere in or around Corvallis. Some friends of my parents brought the kittens to the picnic. Now that I am an adult, I wonder if they were trying to get rid of the kittens. And who better to foist a kitten on than my parents who had two preschool-aged children? But none of that mattered to me in my pre-school years.

Of course, I pleaded for a kitten as soon as I saw the litter. I wanted a kitty so much. The only cat I’d spent much time with until that point was my grandparents’ old cat (named Kitty). My grandparents had owned Kitty since my mother’s high-school years—about a decade earlier. Kitty hid under the couch whenever my brother and I visited. She did not like little kids.

But despite my experience with Kitty, I knew I loved kitties. And I knew if I had a kitten, it would love me and I would love it. And we could play together.

I guess my pleas for a kitten that day were successful, though I wonder now why they were. My dad was in graduate school, my mother didn’t work, and they had little money. My dad was allergic to cats. My mother had two pre-schoolers to manage. Why did they agree to take on a pet? Were they still feeling guilty about giving away Punky?

Whatever the reason my parents agreed, about a week after the picnic, a kitten showed up at our house. My parents had not told us we were getting a kitten, so it was a complete surprise to my brother and me, and I was ecstatic. We named the kitten Kitty (or more formally, Kitty-Cat).

I thought of Kitty-Cat as my cat, but she wasn’t really. She studied with my father late at night after everyone else was in bed. Despite his allergies, he played with Kitty—throwing her wadded-up paper balls of calculations from his engineering classes, which she batted about on the floor. She ate the chopped liver my mother made for her to treat her skin condition. Kitty purred loudly and wrapped around my mother’s legs as Mother fried the liver. Kitty barely tolerated me and tolerated my little brother even less, though occasionally I could wrap her in a doll blanket and put her in my doll’s crib.

Kitty-Cat was beautiful. As she grew, her fur became even softer than when she was a baby. (Of course, it did—she lived on a diet of chopped liver.) Her markings were gorgeous. She was more visible than my grandparents’ cat, and we all loved her.

Unfortunately, about a year after we got Kitty-Cat, a car hit her as she crossed a busy street near our house. I was never allowed to cross that street by myself, but Kitty-Cat didn’t follow the same rules. This was about 1960, and people didn’t try to control their cats. Cats roamed at will, inside and out. Kitty-Cat’s roaming led to disaster.

And that was that for pets in Corvallis. Our next family pet was Nick, my father’s English Setter.

My current work-in-progress features kittens. The little girl in the novel is just as ecstatic about playing with kittens as I was at her age. Her cat does not get killed, though it is almost run over by a horse. That little girl is more imaginative in naming her kitten than my family was. For more, you’ll have to wait for the book (which is nearing completion).

What do you remember about pets from your childhood?