When my friend told me he could see me as a cat lady, I was flattered. Sexy black unitard, kitten ears, reflexes of a feline. Who wouldn’t be? He shook his head.
“No, not Catwoman,” he clarified, “Cat lady. You know, one of those women who never gets married but sits around all day in an apartment with lots of books and 35 cats.”
Oh. So no unitard?
“No,” he said, “No unitard.”
I’m not going to lie and say that this is something I couldn’t see happening. “Becoming a cat lady” probably ranks above “smoking crack” and “investment banking” on the list of things I am likely to try in the future. I don’t anticipate a life of unhinged isolation, but given the right reading material, being a cat lady doesn’t sound like that bad of a life.
The pets I had growing up are some of the defining characters of my childhood and teenage years. One of my first memories is of my first cat, Yossarian, dying. We kept her body in the garage for three days before we could cremate her, and I was scared to go in there until we moved out of that house when I was six.
After leaving Chicago, my parents and I lived in an apartment complex off of an Illinois highway for six years. We had two cats we brought with us from the city, Zippy and Zorro; the latter had been hanged and tortured by gang members before we adopted him. He was missing a little chip of one ear, had the hair rubbed off his neck, and wouldn’t let anyone within a couple of feet of him. When we moved, he ran away for a week, but after my mom rode her bike around the complex he showed up at our door. It was a Stanley-Livingston moment of feline proportions: Zorro, I presume?
When I was nine, another cat started appearing at our apartment. We took her in, named her Lady and promptly realized that there were two of her…and three kittens living in a bush outside our building. This led to the high point of animal inhabitancy: seven cats, three humans, and two goldfish I won at the Presbyterian Church carnival, a veritable menagerie in a two-bedroom apartment.
I guess I grew up in a family where pets were members of the family. My childless aunt and uncle sent us photos of their Scottie dogs every few months, and queries about the cats (“How are Castor and Pollux?”) always followed the personal greeting when we called my grandmother. One of the Presbyterian goldfish lived for five years with my three cats drinking out of his bowl. I had named him Crackers, which in hindsight is an incredibly funny and racially charged name for a goldfish in a family of white Kentuckians. My mom called a veternarian specializing in fish when Crackers got “sick” (how do you know when a fish is sick?), who informed her that he specialized in more—ahem—rare varieties of sea creatures than church-carnival fish. Touché.
The first time I ever saw my dad cry was when Zippy the cat died. The three of us drove him to the emergency animal hospital when we realized he couldn’t breathe, and he was put down that evening after being “diagnosed” with cancer. It seemed strange to me that my dad—who battled his own cancer—was so distraught about a cat, but in retrospect it makes perfect if inexplicable sense.
Have you ever seen “The Butterfly Effect?” With Ashton Kutcher? Yeah, me neither. That’s because when I went to see “The Butterfly Effect” with two friends my junior year in high school, we accidentally went an hour early. So to kill time, we went to Petsmart to look at dogs, and ended up purchasing a male Siberian dwarf hamster we named Diva.
Diva led a short but action-packed life as he was passed covertly from house to house. When I found one of his other owners feeding him a pencil (“Well he sleeps in wood shavings!”) I intervened and gained full custody. I ended up giving him to a friend with a little brother, who renamed him Smurf. Good call.
By the time I was a senior in high school, Zorro had grown into a fat and happy cat who spent his days sitting on my dad and watching Lady scare chipmunks in our yard. My senior spring, he died. After I rode home from the animal hospital with my parents—relegated to the back seat once more—I sat on the side of my bed and cried. Not just about Zorro, but about graduating high school, leaving my friends, and no longer being at home to notice the absence of the ball of fur that slept on the foot of my bed.
It’s weird being here at school without a pet. Freshman year, I illegally kept a hermit crab named Hubert in my Grays common room. My roommates and I adored him (and his shell, with a smiley face painted on it) but when he died in February, we cremated him, tossed his crabby coffin into the Charles, and moved on. Now I can’t imagine having a pet, seeing as I can’t even remember to water plants.
The only animals I come across regularly these days are the two tiny dogs my tutors keep in our Winthrop entryway and the skunk that dawdles in the area between New Quincy, JFK Street, Winthrop, and Mt. Auburn. (You know who I’m talking about. He and I had a face-off just the other night outside of the Advocate.)
Maybe I’m off the track to becoming a cat lady, having been pet-free for two years. But I’m pretty sure if I wanted to, that crazy coalition would take me back.
–Emma M. Lind ’09 is a History and Literature concentrator in Winthrop House. Her favorite musical is “Cats.” Her favorite album is the “Cats” soundtrack. Her favorite book is the playbill for “Cats.”
