We never had to beg for pets as children because my mom loves animals. Because of this, we had a lot of different pets growing up. Many of my friends fondly remember their cat or dog from childhood. We, however, remember our generations of dogs, cats, hamsters, rabbits, and fish.
The first pet I remember having was our dog Nala. Makes sense to name our dog after a famous lion, and never acknowledge The Lion King when naming any of the dozen cats we’ve had, right? Also adding further insult to injury to The Lion King, we never once pronounced her name as it’s pronounced in the movie. We instead adopted a Midwestern pronunciation, saying her name so that the “Nal” sounded like how you’d pronounce the name Al.
Nala was a Yorkshire Terrier and I have many fond memories of her from my childhood. She slept on a pillow on the floor at the end of my bed every night. One morning while waiting for the school bus to go to kindergarten, my grandma waiting with me outside, we noticed Nala jumping up and down in the window to watch me get on the bus. I found this so amusing as a child that I drew a picture of it at school that day.
After getting baths as children, Chelsey and I loved to stand in the bathroom as our mom toweled us off and let Nala lick the water dripping off our legs, tickling us with her tongue.
One year during Halloween she ran around our couch in circles for hours, the endless doorbell rings driving her to a level of excitement that she didn’t know what else to do with.
She always got a treat after going outside, and one time I said the trigger word, “treat,” walked her over to the treat bowl, and saw that there were none left. She didn’t understand this. To her, when the word treat was spoken, she got a treat no matter what. There was never a situation where that didn’t happen. I offered her something else instead, a bit of leftover snack from the kitchen. She had no interest in this. She followed me around expectantly for hours, and I don’t think she ever forgot my transgression. I certainly haven’t either.
Nala was trained so well, we could let her out the front door to go to the bathroom and she would walk quietly around, do her business, and make a single bark at the front to door to be let in, not even interested in leaving our yard.
Often I’d be on the couch, playing my Gameboy and she’d be barking to be let in. Often, my Pokemon game took priority. But one day without anything prompting me, I realized how hard it would be to be trapped outside and wanting in, but unable to do anything about it until your nine-year-old owner decided was a suitable time to pause Pokemon for three seconds and open the door. So I adopted a rule: the most she could have was three barks and I had to let her in before the fourth one.
I remember sometimes after the third bark I’d sprint through the house, desperate to reach the front door before she reached the dreaded bark number four, as if she were on the other side of the door thinking, “If I really have to get to the fourth bark right now…”
Nala was around for a long time, from my childhood through high school. She died peacefully in my mom’s arms while I sat beside the two of them, mortified by what was happening.
We had a cat with one of the most fascinating etiologies of the development of the name he was eventually given. We tried starting with Simba, but it just didn’t work for us. He was a cat, after all, and that clearly didn’t make sense for us given Nala’s name/dog identity. Eventually, Chelsey changed his name to Max which stayed for a while before she changed it again. No one could keep up with his name changes, including Chelsey, who frequently called him by one of his previous names mistakenly.
Meanwhile, he grew abnormally large. He got fat, yes, but even aside from that he was enormous. We started calling him big cat, and eventually it stuck. Big Cat became his permanent name, and nothing we’d tried before suited him better.
Once, Chelsey agreed to “give” Big Cat to me. He was my cat now. I immediately felt an extreme allegiance to him that I’d never considered feeling when he wasn’t “mine.” During this period, I once saw Big Cat through a window outside under a tree on a rainy day. He was playing with a small garden snake, pawing at it, amused, completely unbothered. The snake merely tried to stand its ground. I, however, was horrified. I’d already developed my snake phobia that still resides in me to this day. My cat was not about to be murdered by some snake.
I ran outside in the rain, crying, pleading with Big Cat to come inside. He either looked at me with no expression on his face, or ignored me completely, as cats do. He had no interest in what I had to say, and no idea I was his current owner.
I appealed to my parents, who shrugged it off and said he would be fine and that it was a harmless type of snake and that neither Big Cat nor the snake were interested in each other. This was inconceivable to me. “He’s my cat,” I sobbed. I had to do something. However, there was only so much I could do for him in this moment because I was too afraid of the snake to get more than 20 feet close to him. Eventually, he must’ve left the snake alone and lazily made his way inside, out of the rain.
Big Cat was succeeded by Amber, another cat. At this point, Big Cat was old news to my sister and I (and back safely in the ownership of her care), and we were so obsessed with our new kitten Amber that we were stunned to hear her vibrating as we played with her. We’d completely forgotten that cats purred, as Big Cat was an adult now and spent a lot of his time outside, uninterested in us.
At some point amid these three mentioned pets, we also acquired two rabbits. They were to replace my sister’s original rabbit, Petey. Chelsey named him Petey having no idea of the existence of Peter Cottontail. She just happened to him that.
Petey was the replacement of another rabbit whose name I have forgotten, who died in our woods after he got out of his cage. Petey had a stronger, newer cage and even a playpin we’d put him in so he could hop around. The cage was made of a fine wire mesh so nothing could get in or out, but he was still able to be out in the fresh air. Petey’s playpin had a roof made of the same material, so sometimes we would let him out in the pin for hours and leave him there for some alone time to hop around in the grass.
During one of these times, someone’s dog had gotten loose and was running around the neighborhood. We later found Petey dead in his playpin, though the dog had not been able to get in. The roof was bent inward from where it had jumped on top. I remember looking at the empty cage later with the grass, my dad on the other side, telling me that he hadn’t been hurt at all, and how he had likely died of fright.
“I have a lump in my throat,” I said, barely able to speak.
“Well, that’s okay,” my dad said. “You can cry if you want.”
Petey was eventually replaced with two more rabbits, siblings, in fact. The naming of these rabbits is a story that is still debated between my sister and I to this day, but since I am telling this story, you’ll hear my version (the correct one). I wanted to name my rabbit Thumper, off of the rabbit from Bambi. Unfortunately for me, Chelsey named her rabbit Thumper before I could claim it. I swore that I wanted it first, but it didn’t matter, her rabbit was already named and she refused to budge. I begrudgingly named my rabbit Thumper Jr. This was the only logical thing I could think of at the time.
Once, my dad had fed them strawberries unbeknownst to Chelsey and I. Their fur was light colored, and when we went to check on them they were covered in bright red strawberry juice. We ran screaming, horrified of what had happened to them.
My mom once complained that my sister and I never helped with the rabbits even though we had begged for them and swore we’d take care of them every day. It was true, we didn’t help much. She fed and watered them every day. I remember watching her through the window, filling up their water bottle from the faucet off the side of the house, and walking it back to their cage.
After having them for quite a long time, we realized that we had lost the excitement we felt for them at first and felt intense guilt for not playing with them as much. But obviously not enough guilt to start playing with them. We convinced our dad to let us take them back to the pet store that we’d bought them from years ago, explaining to the pet owners that they had always been domesticated and deserved a home that was more interested in them than we were.
Chelsey and I also had hamsters. It was a similar situation with the rabbits, our passionate response to them eventually wore off. They began biting us if we tried to play with them because we’d been handling them less. I dreaded cleaning my hamster’s cage because I’d have to pick him up to get him out while I restocked his bedding.
Before it got to that point, though, Chelsey and I created a maze for our hamsters. We pieced together four leftover square pieces of floor tiling and cut up pieces of cardboard, gluing them to the tile to create a complicated path for our hamsters. Unfortunately, they were taller than the pieces of cardboard we’d used, and they often just climbed over the walls of the maze. Still, we were certain we were scientists on the brink of discovering something major when we placed them in the maze.
Once when I returned from staying at a friend’s house, my mom broke the news that my hamster had died. I placed him in a box and buried him in our backyard. Afterward, I tried to say a few words, but all I could muster was, “You were the best hamster ever,” before I ran back up to the house, bawling.
We have had many animals since these, but these were the pets of my childhood. It’s simply a part of life that my sister and I had to grapple with the death of each of them as we grew up. Although we may forget what they looked like or even the names of some of our earlier pets, the joy they brought us will never be forgotten.
My Life, But Funny 