SASHA FIERCE

Why is it that young people think that "old" people don't know anything about contemporary culture?

We recently had a tiger-stripe female cat decide to stay with us. A few days later she produced three kittens. After the kittens were born, the mother was, of course, very protective and all of our cats, except one, are old. All the cats were intimidated by the mother cat. One day my brother commented about how "fierce" she was and I said, "Oh, I'm going to name her "Sasha Fierce". He said, incredulously, "HOW would you know about Sasha Fierce?" Being offended that he thought that I wouldn't know Beyonce's other persona, I reacted, "Well, DUH, I DO read!" Later, I said, "After all, I am understated, yet a woman of the twenty-first century." He said, "Well, that sounds better than DUH!"

For the cat lovers, you know when you name a cat, it's all over and they are there to stay. Gerald named the kittens and they have all joined the family: Puff, Piewackit4, Louise, Spot, Frances, Snowball, Patches and the youngin' Stormy. Last year a neighbor down the street called and asked, "Are you the folks with the cats?" I was immediately filled with anxiety as I thought she was probably thinking that I was "the crazy cat lady at the end of the street." I answered, timidly, "Yes, we have cats." She then said that she and her daughter had been walking and they had spotted a kitten in a storm drain and they couldn't get it out and they wondered if we might help. Gerald immediately went there and leaned over and said, "Hey, kitty, kitty" and the kitten leapt out of the storm drain. That's how "Stormy" entered our lives. My brother said it was lucky he wasn't in a sewer or we might have named him "Ed Norton".

A woman who worked for me called me one evening crying. She told me that she'd gone to empty her trash in her complex's dumpster and there was a kitten in the dumpster. She said she tried to get it out but couldn't. Gerald went and retreived the kitten. We decided to name him "Rumpke". My brother said he was glad the dumpster wasn't owned by Waste Management!

Gerald's niece Robin was visiting and she said she couldn't believe that we had a cat named Piewackit because a friend of hers did too. I told her that her friend must like the movie "Bell, Book and Candle" as Kim Novak's cat in the movie is named Piewackit. I like the name so much that I am now on Piewackit4!

A friend of mine who has cats named several of hers after the cats in the musical "Cats', but I told her that I couldn't name any from that or the book on which it's based, "Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats", because T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite. My friend says I'm the only politically correct cat namer she knows.

Our cat Frances is named Frances Albert Sinatra because the cat has one blue eye and one green eye, so we call him "Old Blue Eye"!