Before I was a Cat Person

You don’t turn a suitcase into a dog and a sister into a cat unless you have to.

When I was young, my sister, Allison, and I used to play a game where we pulled a suitcase around the house on a leash. The suitcase was named Pickle, and he was our dog.

Once my parents held a series of interviews to choose a new babysitter. My parents asked these female college students about their experience with children and their driving records. Then Allison and I introduced them to Pickle, to see if they could hang. After the last woman left, we had a family discussion about the candidates. I argued vehemently for the woman whose hair was long and shiny, a lovely dark brown like my mom’s, a color I’d always coveted. The others cared more about her credentials and how she treated Pickle.

We had another game, where I was a cat named Crystal Kitten. Allison set a small bowl of milk on the floor, and I lapped it up with my tongue and crawled around while my sister patted my head and told me I was a good cat. My mom didn’t like this game. She said, “Don’t make Savannah do that.” Allison insisted, “Mom, she likes it!” I must have liked it, because I didn’t like milk and only drank it when in character as Crystal Kitten, or when my aunt threatened that my bones would break if I didn’t.

It should be obvious by now that I was being raised in a petless home. You don’t turn a suitcase into a dog and a sister into a cat unless you have to. When I was around four years old, my family got two pet guinea pigs. Allison named Winterbottom after his snow white bottom and a character in Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons. Chester was a curly ginger boy. They were cute little mammals. I held them sometimes, and watched them sniff around in their cage, which sat next to the plastic craft cabinet, which we’d named Rosie.  

For the next three years, we lived happily together, the six of us — Mom, Dad, Allison, Crystal Kitten, Winterbottom, and Chester.¹ One lovely summer evening, my family ate dinner on the patio in our backyard. The guinea pigs’ cage sat on the grass for a little enclosed field trip, so they could experience nature and gain some perspective under the wide open sky. I ventured across the lawn to look at Winterbottom and Chester. On their backs, paws curled up, they looked especially adorable. I yelled for my family to come quick and see how cute they looked asleep. But they weren’t sleeping; guinea pigs don’t sleep during the day, and only need four to six hours at night. My mom hurried over and pronounced our sweet pets dead.

Cause of death? Murder. Accidental, but still: the gardener, in the backyard, with the fertilizer. To this day, my mom worries we blame her for their deaths. I’ve only ever blamed the gardener, who put fertilizer on the lawn without telling my parents. The guinea pigs had spent several happy evenings in the yard eating unfertilized grass, but that night, their field trip turned deadly. We buried the guinea pigs below the tire swing in the corner of the yard, next to the giant wooden sandbox some neighborhood cats used as their litter box. And then we were petless again for two years.

Red Eared Sliders in the wild. March, 2023.

For my ninth birthday, I got two baby turtles from a scruffy pet store in Sacramento. Red Eared Sliders, like raw eggs, are sometimes-carriers of salmonella, so you needed to be an educator to buy one in California. My mom taught at the local community college, and thank goodness, because I really wanted cute little pet turtles. I named them Zippy and Dumbledore, and we set up a tank where the guinea pig cage had once been, beside steady Rosie, the art supplies cabinet, who lives on to this day. Four months later, on his first Thanksgiving, Dumbledore spontaneously died.² The turkey had yet to be cooked, and my aunts, uncles, and cousins had yet to arrive when I found Dumbledore floating in the water, as dead as Chester or Winterbottom. We didn’t have time to mourn or bury him, so we put him in a Ziplock bag in the freezer. Once a turtle is in the freezer, the burial plan becomes less urgent, and he stayed in that cryochamber for longer than I care to admit.

And so, the turtle duo became one. Of course the one with the better name died, I thought cynically. My parents said I could rename the survivor Dumbledore if I liked the name so much. But come on, that’d be heinous. 

Zippy and I were friends, sort of. I watched him, fed him, and picked him up; he scurried away from me without making eye contact. My mom felt bad for Zippy, all alone in his tank, with a small place to swim and a smaller place to sun. On warm days, she’d fill a baby pool in the backyard and let Zippy swim around in it. She put chicken wire over it, but somehow he always Houdini’d his way out. We’d search frantically before finding him by the fence, trying to dig a hole to freedom.

It’s hard to bond with a reptile. It’s even harder when that reptile keeps running away.

After a few years, Zippy began his second act as a classroom pet. The teacher came to pick him up, tank and all, and we said goodbye. She didn’t ask us his name. 

We were petless again, this time by choice. “We are not animal people,” my parents said, just as we weren’t car people. This didn’t mean we didn’t like animals but that we didn’t need to live with them. We’d tried turtles and guinea pigs. We’d taken home class pets of various sorts. But we were just cosplaying, and not very well. Animal people have dogs and cats. Pickle and Crystal didn’t count.

Disney’s The Kid: pro-dog propaganda?

In the 2000 Bruce Willis flick Disney’s The Kid, Bruce’s character Russ’s child self inexplicably shows up, looks around grown Russ’s life, and is disappointed on all fronts. “Let me get this straight, I'm forty, I'm not married, I don’t fly jets, and I don't have a dog? I GROW UP TO BE A LOSER!” This line made its way into my family’s lexicon, and we’d sometimes exclaim, “I don’t even have a dog” in the little boy’s devastated tone. Bruce gets a dog by the end of the film, but we never did. My experiences with my friends’ dogs were mixed. Sometimes I bonded with them; sometimes they humped my leg and chased me into a pantry, where I cowered and awaited my rescue.

Cats were off the table because my dad and my sister were both allergic and my mom grew up with too many of them. My friend’s family got a cat after her five-year-old brother kept saying he needed a cat. How did he know? I wasn’t an animal person, so I had no idea. But I needed one, too.

To Be Continued…

1. Pickle was off duty at this point.

2. This is not a Harry Potter spoiler. Or is it?