When I was around 12-13, I was given a Siamese kitten for Christmas. My parents bought her from one of my cousin Sue Ellen’s teachers. I named the affectionate, beautiful, kitten, Ming-Toy. She was cream-colored with touches of brown that later darkened into traditional features with the most beautiful blue eyes. I loved her dearly, and we were inseparable for the next five years. I carted that cat around, slept with her every night, and sat with her through the delivery of three litters of kittens before she was spayed. That’s enough, my mother said.
After I left home for college, I came to regard her as my mother’s cat since she was the one who fed her and cared for her, as she did with my brothers’ dogs when they left home. Ming lived comfortably as queen of the house with their basset hounds, beagles, retrievers, and a Cockapoo. College and grad school occupied my time and I took Ming for granted. She became the cat back home, no longer the love of my life or someone I thought about often. Still, when I returned home to my parents’ dismay for what turned out to be seven years of trying to put my life in order, she was the one happiest to see me. She crawled into my lap when I sat, followed me about the house, and bounded into my bed every night around midnight to stay until morning.
As she aged, she became cranky and easily irritated. One day, when she was around sixteen or seventeen, she unexpectedly tore a chunk of flesh from the calf of one of my mother’s visiting sisters. Without saying anything to me, my mother took her to our vet and had her euthanized the next day. I was too caught up in my own personal crises at the time, and I was completely callous and apathetic about the situation. She was just a pet.
After I moved to Manhattan in 1979 and my life settled into a semblance of a career, I missed that cat enormously. I sound like a character out of Follies, but I have so many regrets about decisions I could have made concerning her between September 1964 and her death in the mid-1970s
