a childhood memory

There was talk on Twitter today about Max.

Max is a ginger cat. Max wants to get into a library. Max's owner doesn't want Max going into the library, and the librarians don't want Max going in. So there is a sign making the rounds of social media about keeping Max out*

(*I even wrote a poem, in the mode of "I lik the bred" about Max:

His name is Max
and wen it's day
or wen librarian is away
he does not wait
he does not pout
the door it open
He goes IN from OUT.)

Anyway, people were joking about "Let Max in" and "he just wants to be around books" and suddenly I remembered something from childhood.

Our mom regularly read to my brother and me. When I was v. small, the cat we had - the old Daisty (Budastis was her full name - a misspelling of the Egyptian cat-goddess, I guess) wasn't in to that. But then when my brother was small, we got Sam. Sam was a big baby. Sam had been poorly treated in his earlier life - today we'd call him a rescue cat - and our parents took him in after Daisty died.

It took a while for Sam to trust us - he spent the first few weeks under Mom's dresser, only coming out at night to eat, drink, and use the catbox. Eventually he moved to under the bed. And then one day, our mom was reaching under there for her slippers and she got a hand on Sam. She started petting him, he started purring - and not long after that, he came out, and became the big baby we all knew and loved for the rest of his life. Sam would let my brother and me carry him around, he played with us, he sat at the table and licked the scraps off our scrambled-egg plates...

And he liked it when our mother read to my brother. I can only assume he picked up on the tone of her voice, but once she started reading, Sam would come from where ever he was in the house, and climb up on the bed, and sit in our mother's lap while she read. One night - this is perhaps a slightly staged photo, I don't remember - but I was in there with them and Dad took a picture of all of us.

This is one of my favorite photos from my childhood:



I was probably eight or a little younger, my brother was about three, and there's our mom (and oh, she looks so young there - she would have been younger there, by almost 10 years, than I am now). And Sam. In his usual place.

This photo makes me happy and now I'm glad I made the effort to scan it so I have a digital copy as well as the real copy. (I should get a little tiny frame for it and put it up on the wall somewhere.)