Cat's Who've Owned Me: Lucy

Lucy was the cat who grew up with me.

I was in high school when Mom told me I could get a kitten, as long as it was calico (I guess she loved them as much as I came to love them).  I suppose I found her through an ad in the paper, although I really don’t remember;  I just know I found myself driving from Turlock to Merced in the family car, and coming home with a kitten.  On the way home, she found her way onto the driver’s seat and her way into my heart, settling herself between my neck and the headrest.  I fell in love.

Lucy the kitten grew into Lucy the regal queen.  Everyone loved her and commented on her size and beauty.  She could be fun and playful, and she could sit proudly and survey her kingdom.  I loved to talk to her and she was so soft to the touch.  She was mine, if a cat can ever belong to a person, and never judged me, even when I called her Lucy Goosy.  I called her my book cat because she liked to sit on my books or newspapers as I read.  Maybe she wanted me to stop reading and pay attention to her, but I don't think so – she was interested in the words too.  My favorite picture of her shows her stretched out in an empty shelf of a bookcase.  The picture captures two of my favorite things in life:  Lucy and books.

Sadly, we found her one morning, the victim of a car.  A kind of comically-sad story surrounds her death:  The family was leaving the same morning for Disneyland.  My nephew Jeremy was house-sitting.  On returning from the vacation, I asked him how Lucy was.  He turned, startled, to my mom who proceeded to tell me what had happened.  Mom said she and Dad didn’t want to tell me before Disneyland because they were afraid it might ruin the trip for me.  And they were right: there would have been a cloud of sadness with me the entire time.  I went to my bedroom and cried for a long time, sitting on the little white couch and looking at a framed picture I had.  She was around 15 at the time (she had lived a good, long life), and spent most of her time lying on the back porch by the door.  She rarely left the yard, so I think another cat, or a dog, scared her into the road.  She rests in the back yard on Angeles Street.