They Finally Broke Me: I'm Going to Get a Goddamn Cat!
A post in which I definitively solve the dog/cat debate.
My dad hated cats. Loved animals. Hated cats.
With rabbits, ducks, guinea pigs, birds, cows, horses, and sheep, it was all love.
But cats? Full on hate.
He chased them from our yard and shooed them off the porch. When a cat walked along our back fence, he shot it in the butt with a BB gun. (To be fair, though it sounds harsh, it was with a weak 50s era Daisy brand single-pump, the Randy West of BB guns. My buddy once shot me with it from ten feet away, and I barely flinched).
Though I never could extract a coherent explanation for my father’s profound feline loathing, he died at age 47 from a particularly nasty brain tumor, so I think it’s safe to say that God owns a cat.
Now dogs he liked. And we had a lot of them through the years.
In fact, one of my earliest memories is of my beloved black Dachshund, bizarrely and inexplicably named Alice B. Toklas after Gertrude Stein’s (allegedly) sapphic life partner.
Then came a horrible little terrier who constantly nipped at my heels and never stopped barking, necessitating a name change from simply “Sean” to “Shut-up Sean!”
After that was a sweet Old English Sheepdog named “Sarah,” and finally, “Buckwheat,” a beautiful and whip smart Golden Retriever who kept my father company in his dying days.
However, despite my father's intense dislike for cats, an unexpected event in the early summer of 1975 changed our family dynamics forever, marking the end of our cat-free household.
Shelby Peterson lived three doors down. And one day she invited my sister and me to see her new kittens. My sister, about four at the time, laid her eyes on a little butterscotch fur ball nestled snugly under its mother’s chin, and fell in love.
“That’s the one I want,” she shrieked. “That’s my kitty. That’s Daisy.”
Too young to recognize this ironic sobriquet in real-time, my first thought was, Daisy? Why Daisy?
My second thought was that, even though I was her not-quite-mean but also not-quite-nice older brother, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was no way on earth Dad was going to allow a cat into our house.
When we got home, my sister immediately started in on my mom about “her kitty” and how we needed to go to Shelby’s to get it.
Likely lukewarm on the idea, Mom avoided being the bad guy by deferring.
“You’ll have to ask your dad,” she said.
The Peterson’s kittens were big news on our street, and I was outside with some friends discussing them when my dad came home from work, smiling and waving to us as he pulled the car into the garage.
“Did you see them?” asked my buddy Eric.
“Yeah,” I replied. “We went over and saw them today.”
“They’re kind of cute, aren’t they?” he said.
“Yeah, I guess,” I replied.
“You guys going to get one?”
“No,” I said. “My dad hates cats.”
Hate’s an irrational emotion. It makes you do things you normally wouldn’t. But so does love.
A half-hour later, Dad emerged from the garage with a stern, resigned look on his face. He strode purposefully down the driveway, passing by us on his way to somewhere.
Not yet familiar with the now legendary Lund family story of how quivering lips and saucer-like eyes, dripping with tears, moved the unmovable object, I yelled out, “Hey Dad, where are you going?” to which he spat out an angry, grumbling, unintelligible reply.
Too dumb kid to read the room, I doubled down, “where are you going?”
And then, as if Mount Vesuvius had a voice, he erupted.
“I’M GOING TO GET A GODDAMN CAT!”
Today, I’m at the age where I have a love/not-so-much love relationship with dogs because I believe they are like people; some are really awesome, and some are assholes.
Case in point: I was recently in Starbucks with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for years. The moment we sat down to catch up, a large dog immediately came over and started licking my crotch.
“Let me know if he’s bothering you,” the owner said with an of-course-everyone-likes-dogs-all-the-time giggle. Before the “eww” of “you” was done I said, “He’s bothering me.”
Of course, it’s not the animals that I have a problem with, it’s their humans. Just as I blame the parents of kids who run wild in a restaurant, I blame owners for the bad behavior of their pets.
And that’s why when my kids brought up the idea of getting a pet, I immediately ruled out a dog.
Just like raising a good kid, it takes a lot of hard work to raise a non-A-hole dog, and because I’ve already put in my time with both—and don’t have it in me to start again from scratch—it was a non-starter.
Now, cats are a different story. I mean, they’re already kind of A-holes by nature. But they’re the cool, aloof, you-don’t-bother-me-and-I-won’t-bother-you kind of A-holes.
That I can relate to. That I can deal with.
And so, I gave my blessing for an addition to the Lund household, with one caveat—I didn’t want to be involved in the process in any way shape or form—which left feline procurement to my wife and kids, which soon after devolved into just my daughter and wife.
You see, in the months leading up to their ask, my kids had befriended some of the neighborhood cats who occasionally wandered through our yard. This was something I encouraged, even going so far as to pick up cat food and individual eating/drinking bowls.
Before long, our yard was the regular hangout for "Jerry," "Tom," "Shaggy," "Tuxedo," and a few other cute but not creatively nicknamed cats. Eventually, in a proudly pragmatic moment, my son said to me, “Why should we get a cat of our own? We can pet these ones and don’t have to take care of them.”
The process was unnecessarily long, lengthened of course by dozens of catastic friends and family who just had to weigh in on what type we should get, my aunt suggesting a British Blue shorthair, which, though I was technically out of the process, I nixed once I found out that they came with a $2500 price tag.
Then one day my daughter texted me from school and told me that her friend had a litter of kittens at her house and she was going to go by to check them out. When she got home, she told me she’d fallen in love with a cute little calico named “Cow Bella.”
“Great, let’s go over and pick her up,” I said.
“Dad, you can’t just go over and pick her up.”
“Why not?” I replied.
“Because, they are fostering them until they take them to the adoption agency.”
Foster? Adoption agency?
“We’re talking about a cat here, right?” I said. “Because when I was a kid, people used to put their kittens in a carboard box and stand in front of the supermarket with a sign that said ‘FREE.’”
“Dad,” she said in a tone I hear more often these days, indicating that I’m both out of touch with her generation and with the norms of a civilized society.
“You don’t get a cat like that anymore,” she added, in case I was tone deaf.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll let you and your mom take care of it,” figuring that within a day or two we would be five. But a week went by, and to my surprise, there was still no Cow Bella.
However, insider sources—aka, my son—informed me that my wife and daughter had made an appointment with the adoption agency, which, fortunately for me, coincided with the day I was flying out of town for a short business trip.
As I was boarding for said trip, I got a call from my wife. Anticipating good news, I jokingly answered with, “So, are we now five?”
What I heard in response told me we weren’t.
Choking back tears, my wife cried, “I failed the interview.”
For a moment I panicked. Interview? Had I forgotten about some job interview my wife was going on?
“What interview?” I said.
“Our interview with the adoption agency. For Cow Bella,” she wailed, now fully in the depths of maternal despair.
“There’s an interview to get a fucking cat?” I said—in my head.
But to her I asked, lovingly, “What happened?”
It turns out that Cow Bella’s caseworker—yes, you read that right—informed my wife that since she was still a kitten, she would need a lot of attention and couldn’t be left alone for more than an hour at any given time, prompting the question, “So, Mrs. Tran, are you able to guarantee us that Cow Bella will get the uninterrupted attention that she requires?”
As you may have gleaned from the previous paragraphs, my wife is both a softy and Vietnamese, but what you may not know is that she is also honest to a fault, and thus, admitted to this cat Nazi that we could not satisfy her terms.
The result was swift and definitive.
“No cat for you!”
“I feel so horrible,” my wife said. “Your daughter really loved that cat, and now I have to tell her that she’s going to go to some other family.”
“Honey,” I said, “Don’t beat yourself up about this. You did the best you could. Plus, kids are resilient. They know how to…” and just then, the cabin doors mercifully closed, and I lost cell service.
“Excuse me,” I said to the stewardess, or flight attendant, or whatever non-offending term they’re called these days, “Once the drink service starts, could you please render me double-fisted as soon as possible?”
Things often have a way of working themselves out, and not too long after the tears for Cow Bella had dried, a modern-day Shelby Peterson arrived to relieve us from our feline-free ways.
A family friend told us that her brother was moving and that the place he was moving to didn’t allow cats, which is weird, because he also had five dogs, but I digress.
Would we be interested in adopting his cat, she inquired. An 8-year-old, green eyed tabby, who was not only “sweet” but “very intelligent,” which, though sounding a little too much like every parent who extolls the virtues of their hopelessly pedestrian child, checked a lot of boxes.
Convenient, check.
No interview, check.
Likely a non, or minimally A-hole-ish cat, check.
(And this I’ll confess to you, and only you, that knowing we might be saving her from the needle made it a “double check” in my book).
To be honest, we had a rough first week, with our new addition splitting most of her time between the fireplace flue and the laundry closet—the bombast of a SoCal 4th of July not helping the acclimation process—but she’s slowing learning that not only are there no threats in her new home, but there’s love to spare.
So, now we really are five, or at least four and a half, soon to be the full five.
And with that, allow me to introduce you to the girl whose name proves that in addition to rhyming, history does in fact repeat.
Say hello to “Daisy.”
Read more stories from The Anecdote.
Awww. Hi Daisy!!🌼
This is well written, as usual, Brian! Love the story and also can’t believe the hoops you have to jump through to adopt a cat today. When I was young, I also adopted most of my cats from a cardboard box or from someone who found a cat, and so on. I had 3! And they were all so different. One was like “leave me alone”, the other was like “let me swat you in the face” and my favorite slept with me every night, always wanted to snuggle, and I named my little sister after her. 😹
You must be dad of the month!
I literally cracked up at “I’m going to get a goddamn cat.” Such good writing Brian, so good-thanks for sharing.