My love
for animals inflicted my parents with untold amounts of whining during my childhood. Since it was less trouble and less expensive to give me a pet than a sibling, I was grudgingly allowed a succession of pets to insure that I grow up to be a responsible, caring, and dependable citizen. (I know now that I was an only child because my parents weren't going to chance another kid like me.)
After quickly tiring of a turtle with whom I could not interact and who was always crawling out of the old pie pan that was its home, I was allowed a real pet!
Oh, I loved that canary. She/he (I never did know) sang and sang and sang. She had a lovely cover for her birdcage. She was covered at night to shut her up. I remember my mother putting the cover over my head to shut me up once, too!
Filling the little cup with seed and the little bowl with water was like having a little tea party. I soon learned, however, that it was my responsibility to keep the floor beneath the cage clean from bird seed and hulls. I was also in charge of changing the paper in the bottom of the cage! What a shocker! I gave the bird to my mother, probably figuratively and literally, and progressed on to other pets.
Whimpy, a ratty little dog came next. He definitely did not resemble my favorite newspaper cartoon character! But I loved him as much as I loved hamburgers. Poor little Whimpy came down with distemper. My long-suffering mother dressed him in a baby sweater because he sat in a corner shaking. She fed him whiskey/water and he finally recovered. I wonder now where the whiskey came from during Prohibition.
The dog was dispatched to a farm (or so I was told) after he bit the postman and a cat took his place. The cat did not enjoy being dressed in doll clothes and being pushed in a wicker baby buggy and I spent many happy hours hunting for the darn thing! I understand now why she was always escaping.
The sound of new-born kittens came from the dark recesses beyond the old coal bin. Locating a black cat with 3 black kittens in a crawl space was accomplished with a strong flashlight. However, the little family disappeared the next day. Had the mother taken her children out through the worn-out place under the coal chute?
(We knew it was big enough because we had found papa cat in the basement previously.)
I crawled dispiritedly under the rumpled covers of my bed that night (I was never a tidy girl) and discovered that the biggest lump of covers was mama cat and her kittens tucked away warmly at the foot of the bed! Fifty years of coal dust was ingrained in the bedding. That was the end of pets for a while!
But I was just a child. Adolescence turned my attention to other things.
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