“In was 1944, Germany….I had to do it.  I had to save the pope.”

Rick and I were walking home from church.  We were in our Catholic phase, going to St. Anne’s on the corner of  Shepherd and Westheimer. I’m not sure the word Alzheimer existed in 1985.  We just called her the crazy lady. She had a shopping cart and she would patrol the street talking to herself.  On this fine spring morning she was saving the pope. She must have had some cogent moments, however, because she managed to call the police and have my car towed one time.

We were living in the downstairs unit of an old duplex in Montrose that Rick and his best friend, Jeff, bought before we were married. Jeff lived upstairs. It was Three’s Company.  Each day we would carpool to our downtown bank jobs, resplendent in our navy suits and briefcases.  At night, I nuked an extra Lean Cuisine  and Jeff would join us for dinner. When we weren’t all putting in weekend face time at work, Jeff and Rick watched  WWF and Planet of the Apes on TV.  On Sundays, Jeff entertained us with stories of his nocturnal exploits.

I was spending a lot of time in Toronto for my job with a Canadian bank.  Huge chunks of time, sometimes only coming home for an odd weekend visit. This was one of those times.  On Saturday morning I got up early to run some errands and went outside to hop in my car.  It wasn’t there. We didn’t have a garage, so the three of us parked in the driveway or on the street.  My car just wasn’t there.  When I asked Rick about it, he swore it was in front of the house, on the street.  Only when I opened the front door and asked him to show it to me did he agree that it, in fact, was not there.

I called Jeff to ask him about it.  “Hey, do you know where my car is?”  He said, “It probably got towed because of all the tickets on it.”  “What? Are you kidding me?  You saw tickets stacking up on my car and you didn’t mention it to Rick”.  Jeff moved to the top of my shit list, giving Rick a momentary reprieve. But Rick was not about to get off the hook that easily. I called the police to report my car missing and they told me that my car had been towed as an abandoned car TEN DAYS AGO. That’s right, you heard me, TEN DAYS AGO.  Rick instantly replaced Jeff in the dog house. We found my car in the impounding lot and had to pay $200 in storage fees.  Put that in today’s dollars.

Willie came with the house.  After we got burglarized the second time, we gave up the urban life in Montrose and moved to the burbs.  Well to Bellaire. We bought a nice little ranch house on a quiet street.  We brought our Rottweiler and outdoor cat with us.  It wasn’t long before we noticed this mangy, gray tabby hanging out at our back door.  It seemed like he belonged.  Like he had some claim on the place.  He took a liking to us.  I can’t say the feeling was mutual.  He was not an attractive cat.  His bones showed.  His skin was as scabby as a leper.  His belly was distended like some starving street urchin. And he had a mean streak.  But he was encamped.  He wasn’t going anywhere so we really had no choice.

Once we got all moved in, I turned my attention to this grotesque cat who simply would not go away. I dropped him off at our gay vet, Dr. McKnight, on my to work.  I said, please fix this cat’s skin. It’s disgusting.  He poked around the cat’s distended belly and said that he couldn’t treat the mange while she was pregnant.  Momentarily surprised by this turn of events, I said, “get rid of them.”  (OK, I’m a dyed in the wool pro Lifer, but hey, it was just a cat).  I told him I’d pick her up on my way home from work.

Later that day I got a call from the vet’s office.  “Ms. Sloas, I’m sorry, but this has only happened to me once before, ever, I mean it.  I went in to spay her and she was already spayed.  I’ll only charge you half price.”  You have got to be friggin kidding me.  I said, “what was it that you thought were kittens”.  “Constipation”.  

Our menagerie, Buck, YoYo and Willie II

YoYo was an orange tabby.  I’m partial to tabbies.  Barn cats in particular.  Indoor cats and purebreds are for sissies.  But having an outdoor cat does not come without its risks.  For one thing, outdoor cats don’t live as long. They get in fights, they get run over, and I guess some of them even run away. Or, if you’re YoYo, you just find out who in the neighborhood is offering canned food and you switch allegiances, just like that…  Ingrate.

I’m a dog and a cat person, which is rare.  One of the reasons this works is because I like cats who think and act like dogs. YoYo acted like a dog.  Have you seen the video of that cat that saved the little boy from the dog attack? Now that’s a cat I could like.

Where do I start with YoYo?  First of all, he was not my first choice.  I had picked out his litter mate when the kittens were not quite walking.  This one little guy would take a few baby steps with his front legs, stretching out his torso until he couldn’t go any further.  Then the back legs would sort of spring forward to catch up. I named him Slinky after the funny way he tried to walk.  Several weeks later when I went to pick him up and saw all the kittens playing together, I just could not bear for him to be an only cat.  I grabbed a litter mate and keeping with the toy motif, named him YoYo.

YoYo and Slinky went in and out our little pet door in the kitchen.  Once we got our Rottweiler, he did too until he got too big.  Then he would just put his head through and YoYo would torment him.  

One Sunday night when I got home from a girls weekend in Dallas, Slinky was missing.  I should know better than to go away for the weekend.  Bad things happen to our pets when I leave town. Slinky just never showed up.  I gave it a few days, and thinking that YoYo was lonely, I got  a gray tabby from the pound.  He was already named Wigglesworth. That was too much of a mouthful so we just called him “Willie”. It wasn’t long before he too disappeared and we began to question YoYo’s involvement.  About this time we moved to a new house and low and behold, a scrawny, mangy gray tabby came with the place.  Lacking any imagination at all, we named him Willie II.  Willie was a street cat and had balls, or so we thought.  Willie was on his home turf and YoYo was no match for him.  Only, it turns out he was a she.  Oh yea, it gets better…..

I am what they call a naturalized Texan.  I’ve been here my whole adult life so I sometimes forget that I haven’t always been a Texan.  I started out a Southern Belle.  Texas is NOT part of the South.  It is it’s own universe.  Memphis was and is as slow as molasses.  People talk and talk and talk and talk.  There is no such thing as a short meeting.  You have to have at least 10 or 15 minutes of small talk before you jump into your business.  I didn’t know that until I started handling my father’s estate.  I spent three months in Memphis while Dad died and then afterwards to take care of things.  It reminded me how Texas is not the South. How hard edged I have become.  How worldly and cynical.