Pets

Pretty Boy, our parakeet in Colorado, was the last of our birds, Herrmann -- the dachshund -- somehow managed to catch and kill the bird while it was out of it's cage and flying around the house.

My parents had a couple dogs back in Louisville that I don’t remember very well. The Dalmatian was hit by a car on our street and killed. The Lab was too hyper and was given away.

Herrmann was basically a family rescue since my aunt’s family couldn’t keep him and sent him to us in Louisville on a plane. 

Herrmann in Louisville. I'm in the middle

The only dog or cat we paid money for was my dog, Midnight.  We bought him in Denver as a puppy and he was supposed to be an Australian Shepherd but was actually a mutt. He grew up to be a smart and very horny and determined medium size black dog with white markings and a curly tail. 

By the time we lived in Van Nuys , Midnight was the scourge of bitches in half the Valley. He daily defeated the battlements I constructed below the side fence to keep him from tunneling out of the back yard. When we tried locking him in the garage he ate through the door.

In Arizona, Midnight learned that he could jump up on our six-foot wood fence and then pull himself over the top. When left inside the house he ripped the aluminum window in my bedroom off its tracks with his teeth, pushed out the screen, and jumped to freedom. We finally just gave up trying to contain him.

Midnight and me (early college years). 

One day in Junior High School in the San Fernando Valley, I was out on our fenced in playing fields for PE and I noticed my dog strolling down the sidewalk outside the fence. I ran over and yelled at him so he came over to the fence wagging his tail like “Dude, why are you in there?” After licking my hand through the fence, he went out to the busy four lane street bordering the school, scanned the traffic, and trotted safely across and on to wherever he was headed. He was one smart dog.

After Herrmann had to be put down in Arizona, my dad went out to his car one evening and found a stray dog we named Mack. He seemed to be a dachshund mix -- when he was wet he looked just like a long haired dachshund. He was a sweet dog but not very bright. My dad always called him an Indian Love Dog.

Mack did have one clever trick, he would beg as we ate at the kitchen counter by positioning himself between two stools and sitting up on his butt with his front paws in the air. If he thought the other person was going to give him something, he could then scoot around 180 degrees without getting down. By waving food or just talking to him we could get him to scoot back and forth in a very amusing way.

Mack sitting up on his butt.

After both Midnight and Mack were dead, I was long gone by this point, another stray appeared at the house so my parents had their first female dog who they named Becky. She was one of the few dogs I haven’t taken to. Finally, after Becky died, my mother was trying to shoo a stray cat out of the backyard (where she was feeding birds) and the cat snuck into the house and wouldn’t leave. My parents had Bogie, their only cat, for the rest of their lives -- he was as outgoing as a dog.

There was another stray cat I had found on the street while I was living at home while going to college who I got spayed and found a home for with one of my professors (J2) and her daughter, who named the cat Pumpkin.

I’ve known plenty of people who would adopt rescue dogs but mine is the only family I know of that just waited for pets to show up at their door.