1. Morris - Black Cockapoo. Ate all my crayons. Somewhere there is a cassette tape of my mom flipping out when Morris and I were playing when I was a baby. You can hear her going, “Is he biting her? IS HE BITING HER???”. He met an unfortunate end when he was hit by a motorcycle at my grandmother’s house. My mom said that when she went to pick up my brother and sister, she found my grandmother with her keds covered in blood. By the time she realized it was the dog that had been hurt and not the kids, the relief outweighed the grief.
2. Sosan - Black shorthaired cat. She ruled the roost. I don’t remember her being a very affectionate cat, but I know that occasionally when I was sleeping on the couch (The most uncomfortable upholstery in the world. We’ll get into that nightmare another day.) she would slink up and guard me. I also remember her sitting on top of a big tower of laundry waiting to be washed in the laundry room, and thinking it was the cutest thing ever. Then she left, and I saw the giant pile of cat poo she left there.
3. Rudy Pumpkin - White Persian cat. This was the first pet that belonged to me. He was adorable and fluffy and ridiculous. I was allergic to him and we had to give him away.
4. Hildegard - Golden Retriever. Sweeeeeet, sweeeet girl. She got knocked up by a neighbor’s dog and gave birth to a litter of really cute mutts. The first couple were born under the backyard deck and my dad had to pry boards up out of the deck to move her into the whelping box we had placed in our guest bathroom. That’s where the rest of the puppies were born. Most of them were given away, but a couple of them escaped from where they were kept in the backyard and drowned in the pool. That was horrible. I actually don’t remember what happened to Hilde. That’s probably a bad sign.
5. Charlotte – White Rabbit. She lived in a big cage in the backyard. After she died, I SWEAR I saw her sitting on a little toy slide I had on the backyard deck. I swear.
6. Pepper – Black and White Lhasa Apso. This was my sister’s dog. She looooooved him. He was a very sweet dog. When we moved to the Santa Cruz mountains, he got very sick and died. My sister had an appointment to take him to the vet and when she came home to get him, my brother, having already found him, didn’t tell her and let her find him herself. We think he was bitten by a rattlesnake. My mom broke the news to me very casually while we were walking through Safeway.
7. Candy – White Lhasa Maltese. She was mine. I loved her immeasurably. I got her when I was maybe seven or eight. I remember hearing her tiny puppy bark for the first time and falling completely in love with her. I had a terrible dream one night that she died. I was so upset that I went to my mother to tell her about it, and she said that kind of dream meant that I really loved her. She was right. Unfortunately, she would later fall in love with another dog we had, Reggie. Our other dog, Winnie, didn’t like that much and she and Candy tangled about three times. Each time Candy was a mess, with terrible injuries that requiring stitches. We had to keep them completely separated. The big dogs were kept in the garage at night and before they were let out every morning, Candy would go outside to go to the bathroom. That morning, I heard the garage door open, and I knew she was still outside. I ran screaming from my room, but it was too late. There was a terrible fight and Candy had to be put to sleep that morning. I didn’t stay with her. I leaned against the wall in the hall of the vets office quietly sobbing, my hands covered in her blood. Then, I was dropped off at school as if nothing had happened.
8. Happy – Teddy Bear Hamster. He arrived for Christmas one year. He lived on my desk in my bedroom where he slept all day and came alive ALL NIGHT. I remember throwing tiny barbie shoes at his cage trying to get him to GET OFF THAT FREAKING WHEEL in the middle of the night. I’m not proud. At some point later, he escaped his cage and lived wild in our house. My mom said she felt him run across their bed at night. She found part of the rubber on the bottom of her shower door chewed off, presumably so he could go in there and drink water after showers. One day, she opened the door to her walk in closet and there he was. He reared up on his hind legs and hissed at her, then ran away. I think he may have still been there when we sold the house and moved.
9. Winnie - Golden Retriever. We should have gotten rid of her the first time she attacked my dog, but we didn’t. I don’t know why we didn’t. Can’t imagine. She also killed a pet rabbit. (Ottis. We’ll call him 9a.) Grabbed him out of his cage and shook him and broke his neck. We got him away from her and brought him inside where he died. She was a miserable, stupid dog. She would follow me down the steep driveway to the house afterschool and nip at my achilles tendon. She sucked. When she wasn’t playing the role of the grim reaper, she would go to the neighbor’s houses and steal shoes, gloves, whatever she could find from their porches and yards. One time she came home with a full glass of ice tea. Full. Full glass of tea. Her demon genes were spread with a singular litter of puppies. The puppies were beautiful. We didn’t keep any.
10. Reggie - Golden Retriever. He was the antithesis of Winnie. He was a sweet, loving dog. His bizarre love triangle with Candy cost her her life. When Winnie had the puppies, Reggie was often let in the house where he would hang out on the couch in our family room. He was completely comfortable as an inside dog, just a great boy. Both he and Winnie mysteriously disappeared from our house in the Santa Cruz Mountains about two weeks apart. We looked everywhere, finally finding a note card indexing a dog that had been found at the side of the road that matched his description, down to his red collar. It was never clear what had happened to the two of them, though I know there was some concern that a past client of my mom’s had been involved.
11. Harvey - Grey “Tuxedo” cat. Scrawny and tiny when we got him, his eyes were infected. He was just a mess, but I loved him immediately. He grew into a huge cat. He was loving and sweet and unquestionably mine. When it was time for me to come home from school, he would sit at the window and watch the driveway. When he saw me, he would cry until I came into the house to see him. He was THE BEST. He had a great “stupid pet trick”. I would throw tiny jingle bells behind my parent’s enormous television and he would jump over the tv and disappear. When he emerged, jumping back out to the ground, he would spit out the jingle bell. Every. Time. He was run over shortly after I moved out of my parent’s house. I hope he wasn’t looking for me.
12. Malvina - Brown Tabby cat. She was adorable. My mom came home from he grocery store, and asked me for help putting away the groceries. I was 14 and fully annoyed. I walked over to the last remaining bag by the kitchen table and in the bottom of it was a tiny brown cat. A little girl had been sitting outside the market with a box of kittens. When my mom told her she would like to take one and offered a phone number so the girl or her parents could check on the cat’s new home, the girl said, “No, it’s okay. My mom said I could give them to anyone except bums.” There you have it. We made up elaborate stories about Malvina’s origins. She won the whole family over, even my dad. We knew this because we caught him one night, with a needle and thread, carefully repairing a toy mouse that she had played a hole into. She was also weirdly competitive with Harvey. She knew I belonged to him and she resented it. Completely out of character for her, she found me laying on my bed and crawled up and laid on my chest. It was right out of a chilling movie where first I was amused and delighted by the attention she was giving me, and then realized this was probably some kind of horrible trick. I kept my body very still and turned my head to utter a plaintive call to Harvey. As soon as I said his name, she reached out and bit the hell out of my chin. I knew it. We had her for years until she was too old and too uncomfortable and had to be put to sleep. She was so naughty.
13. Jeanette - Cocker Spaniel. She was a gift for my 19th birthday from my boyfriend at the time. I took her EVERYWHERE. She was so tiny and cute, you couldn’t bear to leave her. She loved to bury stuff in the backyard. Sometimes she tried to bury things indoors, and you would find random dog treats in corners of the house, covered in whatever dust she could muster into a pile. She LOVED to go with you to get the mail at the end of the driveway. She loved it so much that if she ever heard the word “mailbox” in any casual conversation, she WIGGED OUT. She was a malleable beast. When my phone rang, she ran to sit by it, because she knew that the sound meant I would be coming to sit there too. When I got her, my mom was PISSED. She did not want a dog in her house to, in theory, pee all over her rugs. By the time I was moving out into my own place, she cried when I tried to take her, so she stayed to live with my parents until she died years later. She eventually had to be put to sleep when she was about 14. She was very well loved her whole life.
14, 15, 16. Owen, Vince and Julius - The three kittens I left the pound with one day. One flame point siamese, one orange tabby and one black cat. They were hilarious. They had the run of the neighborhood. One day, my next door neighbor came over to give me copies of pictures that she had taken of them and I died when I saw them. They had been sleeping on her bed. THE NERVE. These cats just waltzed into random houses and slept on the beds. Sometimes I would open the kitchen cupboards and there they would be, one on each shelf. Owen was the Siamese. I admit, I was partial to him. He was also a bit high maintenance. I noticed a little while after I brought him home that he seemed to breath a little strangely. The vet thought he likely had a collapsed lung, something that happened before I adopted him. Much money later, he recovered. Vinnie was similarly expensive…and bionic. He came home with a limp one day and by day’s end had a rod in his arm to heal a nasty break. We didn’t know what happened to him. When I moved a few blocks away, years later, I kept all three locked up in my house for weeks until I thought they were bonded to their new surroundings. I was wrong. Owen and Julius quickly absconded back to the old neighborhood, where they moved in with one of our old neighbors. Rather than risk them running away repeatedly, crossing busy streets, they remained there, well loved. Vinnie was true blue and stuck around. When I was nesting and getting ready for Large’s arrival, I would catch Vinnie sleeping in his crib. He thought he was the baby. I have pictures of the two of them laying on eachother. When we moved across country two years later, he was adopted by my then sister-in-law. Bye bye, Vin.
That was my last pet until our two current knuckleheads came to live with us. I’m trying not to be (more of) a cat blogger, so we’ll talk about them later. Remembering all these guys was a lot more taxing than I anticipated it would be. That’s probably a good thing. Once I had children, I put all pets in a separate category. I loved them, but it was not the same kind of love you have for your child. Remembering these guys in the time and space where I knew them, mostly before the kids, maybe gives them the reverence they deserved. They were lovely. Except Winnie.
Remember when I lost an entire weekend to Animal Crossing? I do. Welcome to my Sunday. I might as well have hay in my teeth. I set about clearing all my requests from Facebook today. There were something like 150 of them languishing in my procrastination pile. Among them were a least a few dozen Farmville requests, thus my toiling in overalls all day. 
Standing outside Medium’s classroom today, I perused tweets while waiting to watch the BIG WISCONSIN PRESENTATION™. I am surrounded in news all day long, which means I don’t watch the news on television. Ever. Most often, I get breaking news via Twitter, and today that breaking news was like a swift kick in the gut. A six-year-old boy was aboard a runaway hot air balloon. Alone. Never have I heard a news story and had such a visceral reaction. I had to stop looking at it, because I literally felt I was going to get sick. A six-year-old baby was in unimaginable peril at that very second. There’s the painful side of real-time web for you. Of course, all is well that ends well, and we can all breath a collective sigh of relief knowing that the little boy wasn’t aboard the balloon at all, but was instead hiding in his family’s attic, afraid for himself having unleashed his father’s balloon. PHEW. As relieved as a stranger was hundreds of miles away, I can’t begin to imagine the feeling of finding that kid, having imagined the horrifying alternatives.
1. The time I had dinner at the home of a friend of a friend, and was told upon the clearing of the plates that the “chicken” I had been enjoying was, in fact, rabbit. It should be noted that we spent a good hour before dinner playing with all the various animals at the house including goats, sheep, run of the mill dogs and…you guessed it…rabbits.