PYEWACKET, ET. AL.

Enjoying dinner tonight with nephew Daren and his family, Connie showed us pictures of a rescued cat she'd named "Lucy", a lovely tortoiseshell.

For cat lovers, we know that the moment we've named cats, they are here to stay.  I told about several of our "naming" episodes.

Several years ago, a woman who lived down our street called, and asked, "Are you the folks with cats?''  I was immediately filled with anxiety as I feared she was probably thinking she had made contact with "the crazy cat lady at the end of the street" and was ready to lodge a complaint.   I answered, timidly, "Yes, we have cats." She then told me that her daughter and she had been walking and they spotted a kitten trapped in a storm drain and wondered if we could help them.   Gerald immediately went there and with the magic words, "Here, kitty, kitty..." the kitten jumped out of the drain into his welcoming arms.  That's how "Stormy" came into our lives.  My brother said, it was lucky he wasn't in a sewer or I might have branded him "Ed Norton".  

A woman who worked for me, called one evening, crying.  She told me she had gone to empty her trash in her complex's dumpster and there was a kitten in the bottom. She said she had tried but couldn't reach the kitten.   Gerald took his extension ladder, climbed into the dumpster, and retrieved the kitten.  We decided to name him "Rumpke".  My brother, ever-ready with a quip, commented, "Good thing it wasn't a Waste Management dumpster!"

Gerald's niece was visiting and she said she couldn't believe we had a cat named PYEWACKET because a friend of hers also had a cat with the same name.  I said that her friend must love the book or movie Bell, Book, And Candle and that I liked the movie so much I'd had FOUR cats named Pyewacket in my life, starting with one when I was a teenager and had been influenced by the movie.

A friend has had several cats she's named for cats in the musical Cats.  I told her that I couldn't name any of mine 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.  She answered that was taking political correctness to an absurd level!

Our cat Francis is named "Francis Albert Sinatra" because he has one blue eye and one green eye;  we affectionately call him "Ole Blue EYE".  

Several years ago, we had a tiger-stripe female cat "decide" to stay with us.  (You notice that I wrote that SHE decided to stay with US, rather than we decided to keep her!)  A few days later, she produced three kittens.  Naturally, she was very protective of the babies, and all of our cats were old, except for one, but all the cats were intimidated by the new mother.  One day, my brother commented how "fierce" the mother was.  I said, "Oh, I'm going to name her Sasha Fierce."  He asked, incredulously,  "HOW would YOU know Sasha Fierce?"  Being offended that he would think I didn't know Beyonce's other persona, I answered, "Well, DUH, I do read and after all, I am understated, yet a woman of the twenty-first century!"   He said, "Well, that does sound better than DUH!"  Have you noticed that young people think that "old" people don't know anything about contemporary culture?