Regular Ramblings readers will no doubt recognize Emmy T. Khat, or simply Emmy the cat, as she’s commonly known. Emmy is the white-bibbed, green-eyed, gray tabby feline who consents to let us live with her.
Emmy’s not my first pet, I’ve grown up with pets of all kinds, but she’s the first one shared by the Lady Marjorie and myself.
The first pet I ever remember having, was a little puppy, who came to live at our house when I was just a little boy. I think I was only about 6 and that would have made my brother, Ron, only about 3.
We were still living in my father’s hometown of Cincinnati, and we’d just moved into my parents’ first house. We’d moved out of the apartment a couple of years before, and now, for the first time, my father had a house of his own, complete with a garage, driveway and a yard. He also even had a fenced in backyard. He’d moved into suburbia.
The house was part of a small development of new homes that a local builder had put up on the edge of the city. There were already a couple of nearby neighborhood schools, and the needed utilities for the development only had to come from a few blocks away.
Pop took a step back and looked around. He saw his new house, his two little boys and his fenced yard. The only thing he needed, he decided, was a dog.
After a search through the want ads in the paper, he chose some likely ads that promised new puppies. He called the numbers in the ads, got directions and then loaded us all in the car, and we drove off in search of a new puppy.
The first place we stopped had a litter of combination Boston bull/beagle puppies who all had the Boston bull’s characteristic black-and-white coloring, but none had the typical Boston bull pushed-in face. There was no sense of searching any further. Put a small boy and a puppy together, or a father who wants a dog, and you don’t need to look any more. One of the puppies was coming home with us.
We picked one who seemed very affectionate; It kept nuzzling into our arms as we petted it and decided that she’d be the one.
On the ride home, our little puppy happened to sneeze twice, and Ron picked up on that and stated for all to hear, “That’s what we’ll call her: Sneezy.”
That first night, we made a little nest for her on some towels arranged in an empty box, near the furnace, down in the basement. Everything was going smoothly until she started to whine because we’d separated her from her brothers, sisters and mother.
Mom, who’d grown up on a farm and knew all things, we thought, biological, wrapped an old windup alarm clock in another towel and tucked it into the side of Sneezy’s bed. The ticking of the clock fooled the puppy into thinking it was back with it’s family. Or at least that's what Mom told us, and it did end the puppy’s crying all night. I just hoped that someone had remembered to turn off the clock’s alarm feature.
Sneezy grew out of the lovable puppy stage, and soon, the role of dog owner became more and more apparent. Every day, someone had to make a trip around the backyard with a shovel, cleaning up after our little dog, and that soon became a chore I didn’t look forward to.
Feeding Sneezy every morning became one of my mother’s responsibilities, and if she wasn’t right on time, or at least what Sneezy felt was the correct breakfast time, Sneezy would just walk over to my mother’s tomato bushes and help herself to a ripe one. She was the only dog who I’ve ever heard of who had a steady tomato diet.
My father got a new job that had him traveling almost every week, and Ron and I were beginning to lose interest in the dog running around our backyard. When my father came home with the news that his job was transferring us to Chicago, Ron and I weren’t that broken-hearted that Sneezy would be going to some mythical “puppy farm” and wouldn’t be making the move with us. I don’t know where she eventually went.
Our move to Chicago lasted only a year before we were on our way again-this time to California. We never got another dog, but the first of two cats came to live with us in Los Angeles, but that’s a whole different column for sometime later.
Right now, Emmy is rubbing up against my leg and demanding some sort of attention. Who knows what she wants this time? Only the Lady Marjorie seems to be able to speak cat.
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