A Couple of Old Friends

I was just put in mind of these two. My old schnauzer, Kasper, who was my dog growing up, and my old cat, Uli, who was my cat through much my late 20s and 30s. They've been showing up in my dreams a lot lately.


Here, they're hanging out in my folks' backyard, on the edge of Corpus Christi

This will probably be boring for most people, so you can probably stop reading now. Just want to get some of these memories down.


We picked up Kasper on Feburary 13th, 1979. It was snowing. As soon as he walked into our house, he went over and started eating our cat Gretchen's food. He was originally pitch black, then turned silver after a bout of kennel cough. He would yodel when he saw you coming home. My brother taught him a trick where you'd hold out both your hands, closed, and he'd tap the one he thought the food was in with his paw. If you laid down on the floor and played dead, he'd come over and lick your face til you got up. He lived til the Fall of 93. I don't think he recognized me the last time I saw him.


Uli (short for Ulrich) was a stray that showed up on my parents' doorstep just before Christmas, 1989.

They'd moved from Pittsburgh down to Corpus Christi when I'd gone off to college that fall, so it was the first time I'd seen their new house. I think it was the first time I'd been in Texas. When they moved down, they had Kasper and they had Heidi, a little black-and-white Pennsylvania farm cat. By the time I'd gotten down there, they'd picked up white stray cat that was eventually named Schnehball (it's sort of German). So the first night I'm down there (which I think was also the night a scorpion crawled out from under my bed and I killed it with a shoe), the first night I say, "You've got a black-and-white cat, and you've got a white cat. Now you just need a black cat." Two nights later, Uli shows up on the doorstep. So I say, "Now you got to keep him."

He was always kind of sickly and stand-offish, being the second male cat in the house. He used to swat Kasper on the nose when Kasper walked over to him. But he'd follow along on Kasper's walks. And then he'd get fatigued, so he'd sit under a bush and meow until my mother picked him up and brought him home. Then she'd finish Kasper's walk.

After a number of years in Corpus, my dad lost his job. A long stretch of unemployment followed before he found work in Tulsa. But since they were moving into an apartment, they couldn't keep all of the pets. So I volunteered to take Uli, up where I lived in Pittsburgh. (Plum Borough, really. Eastern edge of the suburbs.) Had to meet my cat at the airport. Then when me and my roommate got him home, he was freaked out by the stairs in the townhouse. Like the sight of people moving vertically freaked him out.

Couple of nights later, I'm lying in bed, which was a mattress on the floor, and my eyes are closed, and I hear something so I open my eyes. The Uli-cat was staring at my, two inches from my face. He got used to the new place and the new latitude after that.

He had long sharp claws which could leave a good mark on your arm. He liked to be scratched behind the ears like a dog. He drooled a lot, especially when he was happy. One friend in Madison called him Drooli. My friends back in Pittsburgh called him the Uli-cat, and El Gato Pusicato, which was kind of dumb, but we were in our twenties and drinking a lot at the time. In Madison, my ritual when I got home was to call out "Uli-cat! Where you at!"

If he liked you, he'd take your hand in his mouth, not quite biting. But if you tried to jerk your hand away, he'd get ticked and bite down hard. He'd also hunt your hand if you moved it around like a mouse or hid it under carpets or just stretched it past the edge of a table he was sitting under. Which was fine, if you were okay with your hand getting torn up if one of his claws caught you.

He'd flip out if there was tuna fish.

He'd also flip out in a different way if you tried to get him in his carrier to take him to the vet. I always had to disassemble it, then rebuild it around him.

In the morning, whenever I woke up, he'd be sitting next to me, staring at me and waiting for his food.

One time, there was this mouse in our townhouse, kept getting in the food. My roommate hunkered down beside Uli and said: "Why don't you catch the mouse? That's your one job. Catch the mouse. Catch the mouse." The next morning, Uli left the dead mouse on the floor in the middle of the kitchen. I felt proud of him.

He lived to be 19 years old, and was the last of his generation of pets. He wasn't in good shape toward the end, and I probably waited too long. He spent the last night sleeping with his head on my arm, and we spent the last day watching "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and "Cool Hand Luke" before a friend came and drove us to the vet. He rode there with his paws against my chest, staring out the window at cars going by, turning to look at me every so often like he was wondering what was up.

He was a good cat.