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Dear
Joan: I never wanted pets — cats or dogs — but when
my children, now in their 30s, were 4 and 7, a kitten
appeared in our garage.
Much to
the surprise of my daughters, I decided we should keep
the kitten, which my younger daughter named Dusty. We
had Dusty for 15 years.
During
that time, my husband and I divorced, but remained
cordial. When Dusty was dying, my daughters, who were
away at college, told me to call their dad. He came over
right away, and helped me through the sad process of
saying goodbye to the cat.
His
compassion and care ended up in our remarrying one
another. We’ve now been married, again, for 16 years.
So that little lost kitten reunited our family unit.
— Carol
Zink
Dear
Joan: When we moved to Hayward last May, we noticed that
our new neighborhood had several feral cats roaming
around. One of them, a black cat, seemed to like our
yard a lot. She would drink from our birdbath and use
our yard as a launching pad to attack the little dogs
next door.
We went
up to Tahoe one weekend last July, and the day after we
got back my wife, Nicol, was working in the garden and
noticed that the black cat had given birth to seven
kittens under one of our bushes.
Nicol
kept the cat from trying to drag her kittens under
another bush that had a lot of thorns, and eventually
she took the cat and her kittens into our semi-covered
outdoor space.
The cat
must have been a house cat at one point because she
ended up taking to us fairly easily. We named the cat
Roxy because it sounded like a tough-gal name for a
then-scrawny cat, and worked with a fostering agency
here called Love All Pawz to help raise all the kittens
indoors (they took over one of the spare rooms) until
they were old enough to get spayed/neutered and adopted
out.
We
adopted Roxy, and all of the kittens went to good homes
except for one, whom no one seemed to want. So we
adopted Henrietta Pussycat and they are enjoying us very
much — as much as we’re enjoying them.
—
Stephanie Leveene
Dear
Joan: Here is how my Jojie dog came into my life.
It was a
hot summer afternoon and I was about to leave the house
when I saw this dog right at the front door. After
looking around and not finding his owner, I brought him
back home — actually he just kept following me.
He was
skinny, his fur was dull and he was wearing a harness
with a piece of leash hanging from it. He didn’t mind
the cats or my dog, Viera, so I left him in the house.
He was well mannered, and behaved as if he was at home.
The next
morning he came along for our morning walk. He walked
ahead of us, but always looked back to make sure we were
following him.
I did
everything I was supposed to do to find the owners but
with no results. I didn’t want a second dog but it was
easy to decide to keep him.
He is
gone now but I loved him and I will never forget him.
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