Sylvester

My first pet growing up was Sylvester, a black cat named after the anthropomorphic and chronically peckish Sylvester J. Pussycat Sr. who plotted unsuccessfully to have Tweety Bird for dinner in the Looney Tunes cartoon. My Sylvester, despite being the only pet who managed to die of old age, suffered a number of traumas in his life. First of all, his clowder included two toddlers trying to love on him; I myself would hug and squeeze him tight while squealing “Kitty!” My parents were worried that Sylvester would scratch us in justifiable self-defense and so they declawed him. This would have been fine if he were an indoor cat but he roamed the neighborhood and frequently got into fights with other neighborhood cats. Unable to adequately defend himself, Sylvester’s ears were torn to shreds and he would occasionally arrive home bloodied and tell us “You should have seen the other guy.”

Around that time, my parents brought home a tiny dog from the pound named “Giant.” His brief sojourn in the family ended when he got sick, was diagnosed with distemper (a highly contagious viral disease), and had to be put down.

Our next dog was a gray mangy mutt who met us at the exit doors of May Company at South Coast Plaza and followed us to our car. He didn’t have a collar, was skinny and obviously hungry, unkempt, and didn’t seem to belong to anyone so he jumped into our car and we took him home. Due to his underbite and resemblance to Harvey Monster on Sesame Street, we named him Beast. After getting him cleaned up, we realized he was actually white but still ugly as Sin. Beast was a good boy and lasted several years until he ingested the rat poison that the gardeners had put in the shrubbery and died a horrible and painful death.

After Beast’s untimely demise, we got Yenta, a German Shepherd. Yenta was a sweet dog but somewhat neglected as she came into our lives at the time when my parents had four kids under the age of ten. Yenta was mostly an outdoor dog but nobody went outside much. The task of feeding her went to my brother, who as a young kid was afraid of the slugs hiding in/under Yenta’s bowl in the backyard so filling the bowl was not routinely done and only done under duress. This would explain why Yenta ran out the front door one evening, grabbed a neighbor’s pot roast which had just been placed on the kitchen table for dinner, and charged out of the house with the whole roast dripping with gravy in her mouth.

Yenta was very jealous of her feline sibling Sylvester and would often chase him around the house. Sylvester, being clawless, would jump up on the island in the kitchen to escape Yenta’s huge teeth. Yenta wouldn’t actually hurt the cat but she would put his whole head into her mouth to try to show him who was boss. Hint: It was Yenta.

When we sent Yenta to German Shepherd training camp for a couple of weeks, she came back knocked up like the brazen hussy she was and then had a litter of the most adorable puppies. She gave birth outside at night, and when Dad discovered that she had delivered the puppies herself, he made a bed for her inside and spoon-fed her chicken soup. One of the puppies was stillborn and Yenta didn’t want to leave it outside so my dad had to show Yenta that the puppy was dead and let her sniff it before she would let him take it away. Yenta was with us for many years, until she was crippled by hip dysplasia, a malady common among purebred German Shepherds, and she eventually had to be put down.

Following Yenta, my sister brought two kittens home and they ruled the roost for a while. Moische, a female with a traditionally male name, had a purr like a lawnmower. One day, when I pressed the button to close the garage door, Moische was overconfident in her 50-meter sprint time and the door came down with her head inside the garage and body outside. With her unsustainable but understandably hysterical screeching, I wasn’t sure if pressing the button to open the garage door would result in freedom or decapitation. Fortunately, it was the former. She eventually became pregnant and had kittens.

One morning when Mom was getting ready to drive my brother to school, Moische got hit by a car right in front of the house. Both witnesses started crying and my brother was so distraught that he had to stay home from school that day (virtually unheard of in our household.) This was not the first time that the two of them witnessed a pet being killed in front of them. Mom had run over a dog while taking my brother to preschool years before. Now that we had motherless kittens, we fed them with droppers until they were old enough to bottle feed. Whenever someone would open the refrigerator to get the milk, the kittens would start to climb up the person’s body with their sharp claws digging into the skin through their pants.

Shortly after Dad died, my aunt got my seven-year-old brother a husky mix named Edith to comfort him. Edith was my brother’s buddy. She slept in his room and they would wrestle together. Unfortunately, Edith kept running away by jumping over the fence and Mom had to chase her through the neighborhood to get her to come home. This was at a time when she was overwhelmed with losing her husband, being a single parent to four kids, and attending optometry school. At one point, at her wit’s end, she conspired with her friend and neighbor to take the dog to the pound. When Steve got home from school, Mom told him that Edith had “run away.” Steve was devastated, but not as devastated as when he found out the truth only when he was in his thirties.

Now my siblings and I all have dogs, but fortunately for the canine population my mom no longer has one.