When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. - Hunter S. Thompson

06 October 2005

Carter-era Catblogging

We're giving Mister Gato the week off from catblogging. Since I'm in Raleigh this week, and he's back in New York with Carrie and the Chows, his self-appointed duties as "man of the house" leave little time for modeling work.

But never fear, fans of feline-related bitmap graphics. While digging through some boxes of old papers and records the other night at Mom and Dad's house, I discovered, among other things, a huge bundle of unredeemed S&H Green Stamps... and... a treasure trove of family photographs, spanning a time-frame from the early 1950s to the present day. And I got busy with the scanner.

Everybody, meet Tippy. Tippy is the first cat who ever owned me; she joined our family when I was only three or four years old, and she was just about my best friend in the world.

tippy
Black cat, dark night, poor contrast.
The headline on the paper she's sitting next to reads "Carter
offers budget to curb U.S. growth," which puts the date around 1978.
(I almost titled this post "Malaise and the bad old days.")


In my childhood and early adolescence, I was a lonely little geek without many friends--the neighborhood consensus seemed to be that I was too weird to make much a of a playmate out of me--and I spent a lot of time sitting around and reading and listening to my parents' records on the stereo.

Tippy, a gentle soul and also a complete lap-baby, liked this just fine. There was always room in the chair for a cat, along with a child and his book(s). We must have passed hundreds, if not thousands, of hours in just such a configuration.

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