You have heard all about my childhood pets.  But I have had pets as an adult, too.

My first pet was really the dorm cat.  My room mate was a fish outta water on our floor of the dorm. Most of the girls in the surrounding rooms were music majors so poor Doris was exposed to all our musical angst.  We had a great deal of worry about sol feggio exercises.  We all called it sol feg (and probably didn't know this was short for sol feggio, anyway).  Sol feggio  was singing a piece of music using the names of the notes rather than the words.  So do re me is a version of sol feg.  I think we also had to use the hand gestures associated with the note, so practicing sol feggio is a lot like sign language only with singing.  My roommate, due to being normal and all, ask us what was this Soul Fish thing we were all so worried about.  Thus, the cat's name (at least on or floor), became Soul Fish, which I actually think is a pretty good name for a cat.

Did you know that cat's can't digest milk?  Well, neither did most of the kids in the dorm so Soul Fish developed the nasty habit of having diarrhea on the students beds.  Soul Fish disappeared and although the thought is a little disconcerting, the med students had to dissect cats as part of their training. Do you suppose... Nah...

My next pet was a big, blonde, long-haired cat named Marilyn after...well, you can figure it out. I was a year ourt of college and living in a dive apartment with my roommate, Terri.  The apartment was crap, but it was two blocks off of the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City which gave it a certain (small) level of class. I had a job as a "psychiatric technician" (which is a glorified babysitter for patients on the psych unit) at a suburban hospital making minimum wage and supplemented it working retail at a store in nearby Westport.

I bought Marilyn  a pink rhinestone collar and had visions of her lounging on a silk pillow and sipping (something other than milk) out of a swanky silver cat dish.  I thought she made me seem chic...except for two things.   1).  I guess it was the year of the fleas because she was covered in them.  When fleas are too numerous on an animal, they leap off, looking for some other source of food.  My feet and ankles became flea fodder and I looked like I had some rare skin disorder confined to my feet. Several batches of flea dip and multiple cans of flea powder finally got rid of them  but then #2 came up.  As a just-out-of-college trying-to-be-cool young adult, I tended to spend my limited disposable income on things like red leather gloves and tickets to see the Eurythmics rather than on adequate pet care. So Marilyn never got fixed.  A cat in heat is not pleasant.  After suffering through nightly yowling and ruined sprayed furniture (that's okay since most of it was dumpster diving stuff any way), I finally convinced a co-worker to adopt her. I don't like to think about what may have happened to her after that!

When I went to grad school in Michigan, I did not subject any pets to my infrequent presence. Although,  I tried to have some fish in a bowl for awhile.  Somehow, I got the idea that  needed to use distilled water, and Fred and Ginger (so I like old movies, what can I say) went belly up from asphyxiation.

My next pet was after I graduated and had my first real job in Danville.  I adopted a runt-of-the-litter cat.  Cats really are ideal for busy/lazy people.  They are litter trained from the start.  They don't require walks.  They eat cat food without begging for your food.  Since I was an adult (sort of) now, I did the grown-up cat parent thing and got her fixed. Hooray!

I was dating a guy from India at the time, and named her the Tamil word for cat, which is punai  (pooh-nie).  But I never really called her that , and after I broke up with the Indian guy, I regressed to calling her the very original name of Kitty.  Her named was finally The Kitty.  The was actually part of her name.

The Kitty lasted a long time.  She moved to Chicago with me after I got married. She made it through two moves to our current house.  She made it until my son was 6 year old.  Then, she chose a day when we had company for lunch to have a heart attack and die.  If that wasn't awkward enough, My son, who had taken to calling her Creepers" because she was always creeping around, chose to hunt for her to show her, to our company,  after the death event.  I gently took him aside and said, "Eli, The Kitty was very old.  She was so old that her body couldn't live any more and she died".

I was waiting for wailing and tears.  His little face contorted for an instant before changing to questioning wonder.  He looked at me and asked,  "Can we get a fish?"

Our next pet was not a fish.  I will tell you more next time.