HOW IT ALL BEGAN WITH MY LIFE WITH PETS
Hi, there. My name is Melanie, and I've had pets ever since I can remember, and now that I'm 52, I could never imagine life or be without some little furbaby companion, just as I'm sure many of you couldn't imagine being without an animal companion of some kind.
To be honest, I think it was my mother's idea to think in terms of having a pet, rather than me being a pesky child begging her to have a pet. She herself grew up with pets. My mother and father were married on December 4, 1954, I was born November 19, 1955, and my parents were divorced on December 7, 1957. Since my father's side of the family were in California, where I was born, my mother came back home to home base, which was Jackson Heights, NY. So my mother and I (my only being a year and a half old) moved into and with her mother and grandmother. So it was my great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and I all living at the same large apartment.
During the years of 1957 to 1961, in which we remained living there, we never had pets that I can remember, maybe just goldfish. But sorry, one can't, or at least I couldn't really relate to fish as a pet. When my grandmother, mother and I moved out of my great-grandmother's apartment (oh, yes she was still alive, by the way) in October of 1961, I guess it didn't take long for my mother to realize that maybe there was something missing in our lives....a pet. So on December 8, 1962, a little over a year that we had moved into our new apartment, my mother went to the then Greenwich Village Humane League and picked out our first pet, a black and white kitten.
It probably could be viewed that my mother got the kitten as sort of a Christmas present to me, but as I hinted before, I think it was she who wanted a pet more, and named the kitten Babette, which is the French for Barbara...uh, which just happened to be my mother's name...strange coincidence when I think of it now.
Well I hope I don't get pet lovers up in arms against me, but if I had judged how cats were in general by this first cat, I probably would never have had another cat again. To put it mildly she wasn't the most affectionate of cats...very aloof, and very much a loner, despite the love we all gave her. Yet I have to admit one of the great distinctions about Babette was that she literally saw me grow up. Here I was about six years old, and in elementary school when I she came into my life, and she went to "Rainbow Bridge" on December 3, 1977 the same year (in June) when I had graduated college.
I actually managed to dig up a photo of both me and Babette taken September 1965 when I was 9-1/2 years old
