I don't remember much from my childhood. Or maybe I do, but I just don't know how to access them.
I think that one of my first memories is of finding a cat.
We were living in California at the time... probably Pasadena? If that is the case, I was pretty darned young. I was born in Covina and we lived in Pasadena for... five years there? We lived in Long Beach with my Grandparents after then, I think. We moved to Washington when I was in fourth or fifth grade I think, so I had to be younger than eight or nine? If we were in Pasadena, I had to have been something like four or five. I don't know. I was young.
The image I have is of an empty lot with something in it. I remember it as a broken frame of a car, but it could have been anything. There was a cat there. I entice it out and bring it home. "Mom, I found this, can I keep it?" A classic case. We kept it.
The trouble is -- I don't know if this memory is real, a dream, or a patching together of unrelated memory snippets. But I know the cat. The cat was real.
We called him Mickey and he was the best cat ever. Big and fluffy with bold black and white patterns. He would lay on you and kneed you senseless. If you had a fuzzy blanket he would suckle it and get it all damp, I think... I don't know.
It was always a great honor to have Mickey sit on you and kneed you. I loved that cat.
Eventually, as all things do, he died. Kidney stones, found too late.