Chapter 2 (ALL THE ANIMALS I’VE KNOWN AND LOVED cont.)

SMOKEY JO

The first cat I have a dusty memory of, was Smokey Jo, a grouchy grey female cat that lived in the coal bin of the house we moved into in Woburn, Massachusetts. They say that a cat with a child has velvet paws. That was true for Smokey with me, as I was the only person able to get near her without being attacked. Perhaps she was wild, or overly protective of her litter of kittens, but my mother had to quietly have her put to sleep, as she would aggressively bite anyone who went near her.

Not knowing how to explain death to a just barely three year old child, my mother must have just played ignorant of my questions as to Smokey’s whereabouts. Whether it was some insight in a child-like perspective, or just a bad dream, shortly after Smokey “disappeared” I dreamt I saw a black cat silhouetted on the full moon just like the one in the Cat’s Paw ads. Then it turned towards me and meowed, and I could clearly recognize it as Smokey Jo in the moon. Somehow the image and it turning into Smokey terrified me. It was the first nightmare I remember, and for the longest time after, part of my bedtime ritual would be to have my shades pulled down tightly before I could sleep at night. Many years later my mother confessed to feeling guilty when we reminisced about this, and she figured I intuitively knew even at that young age that Smokey was dead.

Smokey’s kittens lived on in memory. We kept a female calico, June, and a red tiger male named Reddy. June kept us supplied with kittens once a year. From that marmalade cat on we ended up calling every red tiger male cat a Reddy cat. However, when I was a teen I got my own cat and called it Tommy. You’d think he must have been therefore a tom, but he was the first male cat we had neutered.