I’ve had a thing for lists for quite some time. It’s a family joke. To the point that a few years back, my aunt and uncle gave me a book called “Listography,” which is nothing more than a blank book with subjects over each page, facilitating my bizarre and socially-debilitating habit. Since I have run out of things I’ve made and photographed that aren’t meant as gifts for someone THIS CHRISTMAS, I thought I’d treat you to an annotated list from the book (oh joy!).
Pets I’ve Had and Their Names
1. The Catfish (aka [briefly] Mustache): Really, this was my Dad’s pet. Long before I was even thought of, my father purchased a Plecostomus catfish (commonly known as an algae eater) to fill out his fishtank. The Catfish was a formidable enemy to any other inhabitants of the fishtank. When I was very young, this monster of a fish ate all the guppies in the tank. All of them. Racked with guilt, the fish attempted suicide on more than one occasion, hurling himself out of his tank onto a sandy cottage floor. The Catfish lived to the sturdy old age of something-over-twenty, grew to approximately 7 inches long, and survived not only his own suicide attempts, but my grandmother’s passive-aggressive attempts at murder and a three-month stint being taken care of by a messy and careless eighteen-year-old girl (me) who forgot to clean his tank quite frequently indeed.
2. Allan: Allan the cat suffered not only from the indignity of being a Manx cat and the only feline on the block having been naturally selected to be tail-less, but also the unfortunate luck to have been named by a three-year-old (me) with a crush on a boy named Allan, even though Allan the cat happened to be a lady-type cat. Allan spent most of her life pretending to be one of my stuffed animals, hoping silently that I would not smother her in my sleep, rubbing her white fur against the bricks of my house that had been painted red and left a pinkish-hue to her coat, lazing about atop the rocking chair in the living room and rolling off onto the crokinole board we stored below, and hunting the flying squirrels around the cottage, consuming all but the filtration organs and tail (incidentally, I have a Clampetts-style collection of flying squirrel tales to this day). Sadly, Allan met an untimely end after being anti-freeze poisoned, resulting in a night of dyskinesia and frothing at the mouth, a rabies-poisoning scare and the most horrifying cat autopsy I’ve ever heard of. Allan rests beneath the birches at my family cottage, watching intently as the flying squirrels leap overhead.
3. Ophelia: Ophelia was the Allan replacement cat. She had been rescued by my piano teacher from her husband, a burlap bag, and a rain barrell and given away at my very last piano recital. I suspect she was about 2 weeks old when we got her. A sweet thing, she would sleep by my feet under the covers after rolling in her litter box, climb my leg while I was doing my homework a the computer in denim shorts, and try to eat my hand while I slept. She is now my mother’s feline companion and, like her Shakespearean namesake, is mentally ill and has issues with boy cats. She can be found hiding behind furniture in my mother’s living room so she can bite at unsuspecting hands and feet and growl at the other cats.
4. Funk & Wagnalls: When I was in my early twenties, I inherited a fishtank from my father’s girlfriend. I filled it with two pearl goramis and a handful of tetras. I named the goramis Funk & Wagnalls (after the encyclopedia) with the intention that if I lost one, then the other would become Funk by default and I’d name a new one Disco. Har har. Turns out that I received two male goramis and they are pretty territorial. The following weeks were filled with one gorami chasing the other away from the food until one day one of them was found belly-up amongst the plastic weeds. Knowing that it was all the other gorami’s fault, I named the remaining one Wagnalls because he wasn’t awesome enough to be Funk. At all. And he received no more playmates. Wagnalls was eventually poisoned by his own water when the filtration system on his pump went the way of Funk.
5. Puck: Puck is my current feline friend. My family’s tradition of naming our cats after characters from Shakespeare plays continues, and he is an aptly named Robin Goodfellow. Always up for japes and trixsy mischief, he enjoys shredding tissue paper into confetti, hiding behind furniture to engage unsuspecting passersby in a round of surprise-tag-with-claws-out, humping my feet as I’m trying to sleep, climbing things, and trying to share my food with me. He also once made an attempt at scratching my boyfriend’s eyes out. There’s still a scar. Ah yes, that little scamp. You can’t help but be won over by his good-natured trickery. :S
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