These are some old photos of two of my favorite pets growing up. The first one is a very early photo of our purebred Irish setter, Belle. She must have been only about 4-6 months old when this photo was taken in 1976 or 1977.
The photo was taken with an old Polaroid camera of my father’s. It is noteworthy that the picture shows Belle sitting on one of our comfy living room chairs. She took over the couch and treated it as her own.
The second photo is of my first cat, Whisper, who was a stray. In this photo she is probably as old as Belle was in the previous photo — 4-6 months old. I can’t remember exactly when she appeared but it was probably in 1984. There is a somewhat dramatic story behind her adoption. My mother was known to hate cats with a passion, even shooting at some strays in the past. We were never allowed to have a cat due to my mother’s dislike of them. I think this dislike came from the time when my parents lived on the farm in Nebraska and they had so many strays — both cats and dogs — that she got tired of caring for them. She hated the way they got underfoot whenever she stepped out of the house, like when she went to
hang clothes to dry. Anyway, I’d always wanted a cat. One day I spotted Whisper in our garage. This photo is the first photo I ever took of her. It took a while for her to warm up to me — she was pretty wild and shy at first. But she was starving, too, and I decided to secretly feed her and provide her with water. My sister, Becky, was in on the secret and I think the secret was successfully kept for about a week before we were found out.
We had an extra refrigerator out in the garage. One time at dinner, my mother was returning something to the refrigerator in the garage when she apparently spotted the cat. She screamed and I immediately jumped up and ran out there to beg that we keep Whisper. For reasons that I still don’t understand, my mother said yes. Thus began an adventure with cats that resulted in two litters of kittens and lots of cat mess in the upstairs of our garage. Unfortunately Whisper was hit by a car a year or two later. One of her kittens had a litter and I kept one of the kittens and named him Pongo.
