In Part Two, The Pets of: There's Been A Death In The Neighborhood, I want to start with a little cat named Adolph.
Adolph was a kitten in the litter that my cat Cristle had when I was a kid. My mother named him Adolph because of the little black square mark under his nose. He was adopted by my kindred spirit big sister Mary, who also had a little cat she named Thumbelina. And when Thumbelina ran away, it was Adolph who led the search party and went off to go find her. He was gone so long that, by the time he found Thumbelina, (can you believe it? He actually found her!) and returned with her, back to the little house on the steep hill on Winfield Ave. in Bernal Heights, Mary and her mother had moved across the city to an apartment complex off of Geary Blvd. on Laguna at Cleary Ct. near the Chinese Consulate, just up the street from Japan Town.
The new owners who moved into the little house on the steep hill on Winfield Ave. in Bernal Heights, called Mary's mother through their realtor about how Mary's two missing cats came back. But Mary's mother didn't want to take care of any more pets, and asked if the new owners would keep Adolph and Thumbelina, and they did.
Callie was a calico cat that my mother adopted in the late 1960s, when she saw a group of boys torturing Callie, and broke one of her legs. Callie was a lot like Sheba, if you recall, who had the mind of a Dolphin and a an Orangutan; and she was also a kindred spirit big sister to our cat Cristle, like Nala was to Little Miss Puddle Butt. When Callie passed away from Lukemia, Cristle was inconsolable. So when Bunny, Bunny Pearl Elizabeth, was adopted, my mother believed that she was the reincarnation of Callie. Bunny would sit in the tub just as Callie had.
When Bunny had to be put down in 1991, because of something to do with her throat that prevented her from eating, Rusty was the reincarnation of Bunny. Rusty and his brother Leticia, who I thought was female and resembled an ancient Egyptian cat, Rusty was a big ol' loveable teddy bear, and they both belonged to one of the neighbors, but Rusty and Leticia preferred to stay with us. And my mother noticed that Rusty did something that only Bunny did. He'd sit on the perilous ledge by the front door of our home that was two stories up, and my mother was just astonished at how Callie had two reincarnations in the form of Bunny and Rusty.
Cristle lived to the age of eighteen and we buried her in the back yard in 1993. Our Poodle Kizzy lived to be ten years old when she passed in 1987, and we adopted Kizzy from a neighbor across the street when I was in the second grade. My mother swore she was the one who named Kizzy, but I gave Kizzy her name after the daughter of Chicken George, when we watched the two week-long tv series, Roots. My mother always said that Kizzy must've been a ball in a previous life because she could play fetch all day, nonstop. Kizzy passed away from an enlarged heart, that stopped beating when she collapsed down the basement stairs when she tried to greet my mother when she came home one early evening. We dropped her off at the SPCA, carefully wrapped in a Glad bag and my mother asked the attendant to not hold Kizzy like a bag of trash, as he carried her away inside. And I have a picture of Kizzy up in a cloud formation that she appeared in one night not that long ago. I think she was saying hello or letting me know she was with me or thinking about me. And when I shared the picture with a few friends that knew Kizzy when we were kids on Facebook, it was Tammy who instantly saw Kizzy in the clouds. You'd be amazed at what you can spot or see, up in the clouds. When I was pregnant with my son, I saw all kinds of things in the clouds. I still do, sometimes. My cat Bettina appeared in large cloud, as did my little Yorkie after he passed, and thank God I have pictures. (I'll share them, but there's so much to go through. UGH!)
Matador is coming through, and I'm not sure if he wants me to talk about him, but then he's like, yeah, sure, whatever, with a shrug and an eye roll.
So my mother inherited Matador, who was a teacup, long haired Chihuahua, when his owner Thelma, who was my mother's BFF suddenly passed away in 1986. My mother met Thelma at a party back in the mid 1960s, and they became instant BFFs when my mother wanted to know what was so good that was inside of a teacup that Thelma was sipping on. It was Thelma's homemade gravy. She loved gravy! Thelma had planned to leave everything to her niece, but a few years before Thelma passed, her niece stopped speaking to her. Just completely shut her out, and Thelma never found out why. So she left everything to my mother, including her little dog Matador. He had a good little life, and lived to the ripe old age of 11.
There are many more pets that want in on this mini serial, like Scooter, who was another neighbor's cat that wanted to stay with us, but suffered a hernia from a wild, crazy night he had with a stray cat that I named Rocket. Or the Doberman Pinscher, who was accidentally hit by a car, while on a walk with his kid owner, who arrogantly showed off his dog's fetching skills and it got his dog killed. Or the little kitten that I was going to ask my mother if we could keep her, until I happened to find her lifeless body that had been tortured; and the little cat that was abandoned by it's owner, who refused to let it back in the house as it practically starved to death.
The pets that I didn't mention in Part One: The Pets of There's Been A Death In The Neighborhood, were like, 'How could you not include all of us? How you forget about us???', except for Matador, who was like, 'Whatever' with an eye roll.