Dandy (197? - 198?)
My parents got Dandy in Blacksburg, Virginia before I was born. I always thought of Dandy as a girl, but I learned as an adult he was male. Dandy was a solid black long-haired cat. He liked to sleep in drawers. Every morning, Dandy woke my parents by systematically knocking their knick-knacks off the top of the dresser. He was an indoor/outdoor cat, even once my family became apartment dwellers in Brooklyn. One day when I was 5 or so, Dandy didn’t come back after being let out through the back window. My parents put “Lost Cat” signs up around our neighborhood. Someone called and claimed to have Dandy and asked, “How much is the cat worth to you?” The caller wanted my dad to meet him in an abandoned building and to bring money. My parents were skeptical as to whether the caller even had Dandy and didn’t act on the call. We never saw Dandy again.
Boo (1987 - 2005)
My family got Boo on Halloween 1987, when I was 11, from a family that lived on St. Mark’s Avenue just off Flatbush in Prospect Heights. They had several kittens and we chose the one that was all black, in part because it was Halloween and in part because our previous family cat had been black. Boo seemed like the right name to give to a black cat adopted on Halloween. Unlike Dandy, he was a short-haired kitten. He had 7 toes on one of his front paws and 6 on the other. His paws were oversized and functioned like baseball mitts - he could actually pick things up. His large, clumsy paws aside, Boo was a sleek, muscular cat. He was a lap cat and a drape-across-your-shoulders cat. When you were sitting on the couch or a chair, Boo would climb up on your lap and circle and circle for what seemed like ages before settling down and going to sleep. Once settled, he would stay a long, long time. He also liked to sleep in high places. He slept in baskets we kept on top of our tall bookshelves. He would lounge on the narrow ledge created by a folding closet door and swipe at you when you walked by beneath him. Boo was an indoor/outdoor cat and an enthusiastic birder. He lived to the ripe old age of 18.
Cannoli (1993 - 2009)
We got Cannoli in the fall of 1993. She was a little white kitten with a gray tail. She was the friendliest of a litter of kittens born in the backyard of some family friends who lived on Carlton Avenue in Prospect Heights. When we got Cannoli, I had recently encountered a cat named Taco and had decided food names were the best cat names. I didn’t much like cannolis, but it seemed like a good name for our little white cat. Like Boo, Cannoli was an indoor/outdoor cat, but she wasn’t quite the hunter he was. Cannoli was never content to just sit on your lap; she would climb up your chest to get as close to your face as possible. She did this too Boo also; she liked to sleep half on top of him. Cannoli was friendly with strangers and everybody loved her. The best Cannoli story is the time she scared a probable robber out of our house. We weren’t home, but from what we could figure out from the reports of police and neighbors, someone broke into our house through the front window, heard the patter patter of Cannoli’s steps or the ringing of the bell on her collar, assumed it was a much larger animal (Cannoli never topped 10 lbs.), and ran out through our back door and then the garden door without taking anything. Our neighbors called the police and told them they had seen a man run out of the house chased by the little white cat. Cannoli died at age 16.
Dora (2004 - 2015)
After leaving home, I didn’t have a cat for several years. There were several reasons for this, among them that I mostly lived in places that didn’t allow them. Then, in 2004, I moved with my then husband into a condo that we owned and getting a cat became a possibility. We didn’t plan to get a cat, as far as I can remember. In the summer of 2004, when both Boo and Cannoli were still alive and living with my mother, a little tuxedo kitten showed up in her backyard in Clinton Hill. She took to meowing at my mom’s kitchen window and my mom fed her. She didn’t take her in because Cannoli had taken a strong dislike to the stray. The following spring, she had a litter of 2 kittens. My mom found homes for the kittens and determined to get the mama cat fixed, but before she had the opportunity, she had 4 more kittens. My mom didn’t want to risk another pregnancy and kept close watch of the mama and kittens. In the end, two of the kittens died, but she found homes for the other two and gave the mama cat to my husband and me. We brought her home in September of 2005. After contemplating several names - I remember Olive being a strong contender - we named her Dora for the subject of Freud’s case study of hysteria. The first few days we had her at home, Dora would walk around our apartment meowing and I was sure she was looking for her kittens. Eventually, she settled in and turned into a fat cat who loved to sit in the window or in your lap. Dora liked to play fetch. She like to move socks - and sometimes much larger articles of clothing - from room to room. She preferred her toys to be still in their packages. Dora’s most impressive skill was her ability to open bifold closet doors. She figured out the trick to reaching her paw under the door and pulling it out from the center to make the door open. Eight months after we got her, my marriage fell apart. She lived with my ex for a while, but she moved back in with me in 2007. In the end, Dora went through so much with me - several relationships, several apartments, several other cats. She died of an aggressive stomach cancer in February of 2015 at the young age of 11. She had always had stomach issues.
Uno (2000 - 2007)
About 3 months after we got Dora, a colleague of mine forwarded around an email from a friend who was moving out of state and needed to find a home for her 5-year-old one-eyed flame point Siamese cat. There was a picture attached of a sweet-looking cat next to a hammer. I forwarded it to my husband and he said he knew as soon as he saw the photo that we should adopt the cat. We went over to meet him and brought him home with us on Christmas Eve 2005. Tensions were high between Uno and Dora at first, but things got better within a couple of weeks. But 3 months later, I moved out and left Uno and Dora behind. As the months passed and I moved on with my life and in with my new boyfriend, my ex did the same. In August of 2007, he moved to Ithaca with his girlfriend and her two cats. In their new apartment upstate, they kept his cats separate from her cats because one of hers was very aggressive toward Dora. In November of 2007, Uno had a heart attack and died. My ex wasn’t home when it happened, but his girlfriend witnessed it. They buried him in the woods upstate. He was not quite 7 years old. After Uno’s death, my ex felt it was cruel to keep Dora in a lonely, segregated part of their apartment and asked me to take her back. Of course, I said yes.
Amigo (?? - ??)
After splitting up with my husband, I spent 3 months of 2006 living in a sublet in Park Slope where I also had the responsibility of caring for the lessor’s cat. Amigo was a big black short-haired cat who started his life in the backyard of the building where I was staying and, it seems, gradually moved indoors. Despite his wild early life, Amigo was a big sweetheart and loved to sit in your lap and cuddle. There was a cat door off the kitchen and he came and went as he pleased. Some other neighborhood cats availed themselves of the door as well. He didn’t use a litter box - he still did his business outside - so caring for him should just have involved keeping him fed. He wasn’t in great shape, however. He had a wound on his paw that wouldn’t heal properly and a swollen lip. I took him to the vet for his paw and the vet thought there was something bigger wrong with him, probably cancer. I gave him antibiotics prescribed by the vet, but I couldn’t do much more without his owner around. I don’t know what became of him.
Buster (2005 - )
In November of 2006, I moved into an apartment in Bed-Stuy with a new boyfriend. I missed my cats and he, despite having never owned a cat, had developed an affection for cats. Bed-Stuy was full of feral kittens and there was a particular gray one we had been eyeing. On November 5, we were walking home from an afternoon party and seriously considering trying to grab the gray kitten when this skinny tuxedo cat started meowing at us on the street. She was dirty and clearly homeless, but friendly and interested in us. We picked her up and carried her home and she didn’t really mind until we got indoors. She mewled loudly the whole way up the stairs, but once we let her loose in our apartment, she was fine again. When we came back from picking up the necessary supplies, we couldn’t find her; she had lodged herself behind the pedestal of our bathroom sink, but she came out again for us. We named her Buster for the habit she had of falling over on her side when petted. Like Dora, Buster liked to play fetch, but she never brought the ball back quite far enough. She was sweet and guileless. Like Dora, Buster grew fat. From above, they were hard to tell apart. When I broke up with my boyfriend in 2009, he kept Buster and I took Dora. Buster remains sweet and fat.
Lulu (2006 - )
One evening in October of 2007, when my boyfriend and I were on the verge of moving to a new apartment in Bed-Stuy, we went to buy a roti on Fulton Street off Tomkins Avenue. There was an empty lot next to the roti shop and my boyfriend had attracted the attention of a small calico cat there. The intersection of Fulton and Tomkins seemed like a terrible place for a little cat, so we picked her up and carried her home. She was much more of a fighter than Buster had been. We called the new cat Lulu and she was the prettiest cat. We kept the Lulu and Buster separate until the move. Just before we moved, my ex-husband called to ask if I could take Dora back. We didn’t plan to have 3 cats, but I would never say no to taking Dora. A couple weeks after the move, we took Lulu in to get fixed and learned she was pregnant. Our new apartment was big, so we gave Lulu her own room and put a box with some towels in it in a closet. On the morning of December 21, 2007 we went in to check on her and there were 2 tiny kittens in the box with her: a little orange fuzzball and a mostly-white calico fuzzball. Lulu and her kittens lived in their room - while Dora and Buster had the rest of the apartment - until early March 2008, when we found a home for the kittens. We hoped to reintegrate Lulu with the other cats, but she never gave up her protective motherly aggression. She was so sweet to us, but so mean to the other cats. She loved when I cradled her like a baby, but would viciously attack any cat that came near. After a while we gave up and gave Lulu her own room again, but it was hard on all the cats -- and on us too. We found someone to take Lulu and give her a good life as an only cat. Even all these years later, my (now) ex boyfriend or I will occasionally come on gchat and just say, “Oh, Lulu.” I wonder how she’s doing now.
Nikita Cutechev and Chairman Meow (2007 - )
We knew we weren’t going to keep Lulu’s kittens, but we had to call them something. We called the orange boy Chairman Meow and the calico girl Nikita Cutechev. They were adorable and hilarious and entertaining, but also destructive and stress-inducing. They slept intertwined in any space that would accommodate them. They stumbled when they ran. They batted and pounced at their mother’s tail. They chewed straight through the electrical cord of a radio. They scaled dresses in the closet using their claws as grappling hooks, shredding the garments on the way up. They got litter everywhere, while also refusing to use the litter box, doing their business instead on the carpet next to the box. As there were just the two of them, we insisted on adopting them out together. It took us a while to find someone who wanted two cats, but eventually a friend of a friend adopted them. She kept Nikita’s name (as just Nikita), but rechristened Chairman Meow as Penny. Not long after, she got engaged to someone out of the state who was allergic to cats. At a party, we met a friend of hers who was hoping to take the cats from her when she left, but we never heard what happened to them. I hope he did adopt them; he seemed to really like them.
Little Hans (2010 - )
After I broke up with my boyfriend, I moved with Dora into a place of my own right downstairs from my mom. I wondered sometimes if Dora recognized the backyard she’d lived in 5 years before. We had been there two years when my mom brought in another cat from the yard. He was a long, slim, white and tan cat with bright blue eyes. His coloring was very unusual; I’d never seen a cat that looked like him. According to my mom, he walked right up to her and rubbed up against her leg. He seemed so helpless that she brought him in and put him in the basement. She posted signs around the neighborhood with his picture and took him to the vet to see if he was microchipped, but he was not and no one responded to the signs. So, when we got confirmation that he was FLV negative, he moved in with Dora and me. I looked at the pseudonyms of Freud’s case studies and decided Little Hans would be a good name for my new cat. It suits him, somehow. Little Hans reminds me of Cannoli. Like her, Little Hans is not content to sit on your lap; he must be right in your face. He’s also friendly toward strangers and everyone loves him. He is a kneader in the extreme. When he settles down and stops kneading, and stops trying to put his head between you and your book, and stops reaching for your face with his outstretched paw, he is the sweetest cat. He’s grown to be rather large, though not fat, and I sometimes wonder if I should change his name to Big Hans. In the summer of 2014, Little Hans developed a serious liver condition, lost a bunch of weight, and had to be tube-fed for several weeks. I thought he might not make it, but he recovered and is as hungry and energetic and affectionate now as he ever was.
Princess Marie Bonaparte (2012 - )
Dora died in February 2015 and I immediately started thinking about getting another cat. The argument I made, as if I needed one, was that I didn’t want Little Hans to get used to being an only cat. But really, I was thrilled to be able to get a new cat. (Since living on my own, I’ve imposed a 2-cat maximum.) I found a guy near me who was giving away a tuxedo cat on Craigslist. He had taken her in with her 3 kittens, but it turned out his son was allergic. He’d found homes for the kittens and the mother cat was all he had left. A mama street cat from Bed-Stuy is just my style, so I contacted him, went over to “meet” her, and carried her home that day with her yowling the whole way. She is a tiny cat and is missing the toes on her rear left paw for reasons unknown. She had a name before I even brought her home, courtesy of my friend Jessie, who took it upon herself to look for good potential cat names from among Freud’s circle. I decided I couldn’t call a cat “Princess” or “Marie,” so called her Bonnie or Bon Bon for short. After coming home, Bonnie took to hiding in the cramped space under my dresser, so I would lie down on the floor and talk to her and she would meow back at me. Over the months, she has warmed to me considerably and become much more comfortable in my apartment, but she remains an extremely timid cat. She loves when I pet her, but stays exactly at arm’s length. House-guests have stayed with me for a week or more before even getting a glimpse of her. I feel like every day she gets more comfortable and I regularly find myself feeling proud of the progress she’s made. I’m determined to make her a lap cat yet.
