The cat that changed my dad's mind

My father's relationship with his only cat surprised me.

I have always loved animals. I asked repeatedly as a child to have a cat. But my father wouldn't allow it. We always had dogs - one was a childhood cocker spaniel, jet black, named Mr. Boh (after the TV commercials for National Bohemian beer), and the other was an Airedale mix named Mordred (for the dark knight in the tales of King Arthur). I've owned two dogs and four cats as an adult.

The change in my father's attitude came when I was living in my own apartment, in about 1971. I was going back to Germany on vacation, so I asked my parents to keep my cat, a solid black, sleek 2-year-old male named Pusskuss. (The name came from an attempt at "pussycat" by the young son of a friend.) It took the wily Pusskuss less than 24 hours to have my father wrapped around his paw, my mother told me later. Pusskuss slept with my father, watched TV sitting in his lap, and followed him from room to room like a puppy. Two weeks later, when I came home and my parents picked me up late at night at the airport, my dad suggested that it might be best not to disturb Pusskuss until morning. "He's asleep," he told me. Yeah, right. I took Pusskuss home with me that night.

A month later, my parents adopted a Siamese kitten, which they named Takhli (after the name of a small town in Thailand, much in the news then because there was an air base there during the war in Vietnam). My father doted on that cat. He had a picture of her in his wallet when he died. Takhli lived out the rest of her pampered life with my mother.

The picture above is of my father and Takhli in early 1972. Takhli is in her favorite place.