In some fashion the notable experiences I've had with cats have only been secondhand for the most part. This isn't to say that I've never experienced a cat firsthand, but that anything remotely memorable in my life that relates in any way to the subset of experiences one can find under 'cat' comes to me through my role as a limp and ineffectual third wheel. At least any standout experiences; I remember there was a party at Rothstein's apartment in St. Cloud over Christmas my sophmore year, and I was hanging out with my highschool swimming team buddy Jon Davis, wearing an onion on my belt as was the fashion at the time - and her cat kept attacking me. Drew blood. Swallowed my pinky ring or something drastic like that, or I lost it sometime after seeing the bottom of the bottle. I wouldn't blame the cat though, which is the point.

We'll start with dad. My dad utterly despises cats, being as he's completely allergic to them, which is why this isn't particularly some sort of dog-cat issue. It's somewhat more personal, though not as personal as a dog. When the family had cats around my father and cats generally had a dramatic coexistence, and it involved a good deal of cursing on one end and pouncing on the other. They'd pounce on the man as a matter of routine when he'd walk out his front door in the morning, launching themselves off the roof of the house and into his neck, claws first, and he'd come inside while I was snarfing down bowls of Count Chocula, messed up and sneezing things that made my young ears burn, a snarl of hatred imprinted on his gnomic face.

One must modify the prospectus that the family had cats, however. We didn't, we just had cats around - that is the cats had us. When I was young and my oldest brother Justin was still completely evil there were a lot of strays coming out of the woods around the house, and they'd camp down underneath building foundations or infest the garage, which was insulated and heated during the winter. The foundations were fine; that didn't bother anyone really, but the garage was a problem. They'd rip down the insulation in the loft for bedding and breed there. Kittens would fall into a space between floor and roof and die back in the wood shop. My father would find dead kittens stuck behind a pile of 2x4s, squeezed between the stack and the wall. Having an entire family of them living above his woodshop made allergies flare and working more or less impossible - never mind the dead kittens. So my father would call the extermination team (meaning my two older brothers and I) back from digging random holes in the ground and draft them into the war. You might imagine that this was just going to be a swell experience for everybody.

Oh sure.

"Go up there toss the kittens in a bag and throw it in the lake. Once they're gone that old mama cat won't bother with it anymore," My father the naturalist. Justin took up the task with revelry. I was there, as I said the limp and ineffectual third wheel, when he dropped the lot of them off the top of the garage, Jeremy tossing them back up to him so he could do it again because mostly they lived through it the first time down; it takes more than a 30 foot drop to do a cat in, that's a lesson you can take home to ma. The mother, on the other hand, did continue to come back. At some point, Justin planted a trap made for muskrats up in the loft and caught her, a big-black white-pawed mother of a cat. The trap of course didn't do it - that'd just give her a limp for the remainder of her life, which, however short it was, in my bleeding heart opinion wasn't short enough.

When he finds her in the trap Justin grabs his air-powered Daisy pellet gun and heads up. My brother loading pellet after pellet, measured pumping, the sucking sound of manual compression. She took 19 pellet rounds in the head licking blood off her paws and cleaning her face, point-blank range. Black, squinting eye shut, mewing pitiful and cleaning red tacky matted fur - still preening, going to the grave with fly whiskers is priority one. It wasn't enough. He freed her from the trap and threw her down into the garage, watched her limp, actually pretty agile on three feet and wounded, away out into the gravel driveway, where he used her for target practice with his .22.

We could consider the conundrum of my brother, who had saved the wing of a robin he'd found when he was twelve, or the injured squirrel he spent weeks caring for before it passed on him - him crying over it, Mom holding him and trying to explain something along the lines of death, or more probably the necessity of grief, to him, or all these things. Consolation: the best mothers can offer. And maybe he was really projecting the loss of our grandfather in all of it, something I don't think he actually cried about directly until he was in his 20s. I'm no pop psychologist but here I sit with my psychobabble. Yar.

The first of the strays to wander onto our property - a mean old hissing tomcat, huge, white fur, that was the one that would attack my father as he walked out the door every morning - was Justin's pet project for months, just to get it to let him pet it. The tomcat actually died of natural causes; I remember it fell into the lake in late fall and caught cold, pink skin in bald patches where fur fell off, constant sneezing fits, getting thinner until dad finally stepped in and shot it. I don't think Justin was able to, or he might suggest he was the one poisoning it in the first place. He was never one to take projections of humanity without reflecting them away. Humor hates investigation.

We used to name them after a while, when they'd stick around, a lot of them came along when they were barely grown and survived for a more or less natural lifespan with us. Usually the three youngest, the little kids, would end up naming them. One of them they named Rusty, as per the color of his stripes. Rusty was also the name of Justin's dog when my parents first moved north to Ogema, when he was about five. We rarely blanched from recycling names, for example I had a line of hamsters, Snoopies one through fourteen, and two named Ed. Rusty was a big friendly reddish-brown (ie. "rusty") dog, and he was stolen one summer, or maybe he ran away but that didn't seem likely, either way it messed Justin up pretty bad when he was gone; he was riding his bike around the township for days, trying to find him. And so maybe as some sort of inverse pavlovian reaction he tied more lines of fire crackers to the cat Rusty's tail than any of the others, inspiring vapid glee in his heart and those of his numb-skull buddies as it screeched its way into the woods. Of course, he did the same thing to the neighbor kids, actually, so it couldn't have really been that specific a prejudice.

What this all leaves me with, really, is the occasional accusatory glances cats give me for the travesties commited by my accursed bloodline, an act of pure anthropomorphism on my part, I'm sure. My 10th grade biology teacher Joe would always grill us for anthropomorphising things, "A molecule doesn't want anything, an act of pure speculative imagination on your part, it's bad science. Bad bad bad." Cost me 12 points on the final. Oddly, when I personified meat byproducts on an organic chemistry midterm my sophmore year in college it slid by without comment. I guess that's just what spam is good for.