Our old cat Archie died just before the holidays, aged almost 19. That’s him in the picture. His death got me thinking about the other cats in my life, and the different times they witnessed. It’s helped shut out the news, at least for a while. Maybe we all need a break. 

Bambi

Yes, my first cat’s name was Bambi. I was five years old and living in suburban North Vancouver when I asked for a kitten. Not that I can remember asking, although my father loved animals—we always had a dog—so it wouldn’t have been any problem to convince him, anyway. 

I clearly remember sitting in the back seat of the old Pontiac, turning left off Edgemont Boulevard and pulling up at a ranch-style house. My parents had learned the people there were looking for homes for several eight-week-old kittens from their cat’s latest litter. I couldn’t keep still. I was that jittery with excitement. 

Jump cut, and I was inside an early-1960s living room, entirely happy as I held a pretty little tortoiseshell. I named her Bambi after the fawn in the Disney movie, although family lore says my mother had to carry me out of the room screaming when I saw it on TV, maybe when Bambi’s mother is killed. My own mother had a strange relationship with trauma, being timid and fearful but also an emergency room nurse, a combination I never understood. Maybe she thought seeing Bambi would toughen me up. It made an impression, anyhow.

At the time, all cats were outdoor cats. Dogs ranged freely too, meaning that a couple of our cocker spaniels got killed when they were hit by cars. Bambi stayed clear of cars but was hit up by the neighbourhood tomcats. She had two litters of kittens a year for seven years before my mother said, “The poor thing,” and took her in to be spayed.

I loved that cat. She was a beautiful creature, elegant, skittish, slightly distant but strong: a feline Jackie Kennedy. I also adored her waves of kittens. First their eyes were closed as they nursed, and I could lie beside Bambi’s box watching them endlessly. Then their eyes opened and they stumbled around the rec room like the world’s cutest drunks. I didn’t care for dolls, but loved books and cats and the ravine around nearby Mosquito Creek, all of which make their way into my latest novel. I had no problem finding homes for the kittens in the growing suburb—49 of them before my mother stepped in. I suspect Vancouver is now populated with thousands of Bambi’s descendants. 

Then I was 16 and starting university, driving overtown every day to the University of British Columbia in a used red Toyota that I’d bought with my babysitting money. It cost $400, although I’ve always wondered if my father paid more for it and didn’t tell me. 

And here’s my first name-drop. One of my high school English teachers was Gabor Maté, who hadn’t yet gone to medical school and wasn’t long out of UBC himself. He and another teacher had taken a group of us there on a field trip. Since I was the editor of the high school student newspaper, Gabor took me and a couple of others to the office of The Ubyssey student paper so I would be ready to sign up in the fall. I suspect he mainly wanted to see his friends on the paper, but it worked. I went back in September, and since The Ubyssey came out three times a week, I basically camped there for four years, seldom seeing Bambi, especially after I moved out of my parent’s house.

She lived to be 21, still at home with my parents. Many years later, when my mother was 90 and on her deathbed, she woke up and asked, “Where’s Bambi?”

“You mean my old cat Bambi?” I asked. “Oh, Mum, she’s been gone for a long time.”

“Bambi was my cat.” 

It was one of the last things she said, and after making her point, she fell back asleep.

The Great Catsby

Toward the end of my first year at UBC, The Toronto Star sent an editor to Vancouver to interview student journalists for their summer student program. I got the job and flew to Toronto, eventually moving into a basement apartment in Cabbagetown that I shared with another student reporter. 

The neighbourhood is now part of the city’s gentrified gay village, but it was pretty seedy back then. We had a living room window set in a well below street level that let in a little light. It also showed passing strangers up to waist level, and men would sometimes stand there masturbating.

My roommate wanted to get a kitten from the Humane Society. I was curious to see what it was like so I tagged along. She chose two kittens, and I was surprised when we got home to discover that one of them was mine. He was a little tabby, brownish, sort of striped. I named him The Great Catsby—Catsby to his friends—got him neutered and took him home to Vancouver in September.

Catsby and I moved into a house on West 12^th with a group of student journalists, people who remain among my closest friends. In fact, my future husband Paul lived there, although he had a girlfriend at the time, and I was busy having crushes on a different boy every month, very few of whom were interested.

We had three cats in that rundown old house. There was Catsby, and my friend Jan’s ironically named Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win. (We’re talking the 1970s here.) Struggle was an enormous furry tabby who must have been part Maine coon cat. The other was Ichiro, who was born in Hiroshima and didn’t have proper eyelids. His owner, Gillie, was the one non-journalist in the house.

When a room came vacant, Gillie had answered an ad we’d put up. The housemate who interviewed Gillie thought she was quite hefty, but no one cared about that. She was a nice person. After she moved in, we were startled to hear a baby crying in the night. Gillie was actually slender, and had been carrying her daughter in a sling under her coat. None of us had noticed.

Ichiro was the other surprise. We all loved the baby, but Ichiro’s yowls could make your hair stand on end. We learned that Gillie had gone to Japan a couple of years before to become a Buddhist nun. One day, while she was meditating in a graveyard, she met a musician named Sumimoto playing the shakuhachi on his father’s grave. They fell in love and Gillie had the baby, but she decided to come back to Canada because she didn’t like the way women were treated in Japan. Sumimoto-san followed, but there weren’t a lot of jobs for shakuhachi players in Vancouver. He worked as a house painter, detested it, and went back to Japan. Gillie stayed, now with two daughters and a cat that lacked eyelids. Ichiro was kind of a jazz cat, skinny-shanked and elegant—his yowl aside—and Gillie doted on him.

At the end of the school year, we were evicted from the house on West 12^th. My friend Sandy and I roomed together for a few months, then Catsby and I lived in a couple of other journalistic houses over the next few years. I was working for The Vancouver Sun by then, full-time in the summer and part-time during the school year.

Meanwhile, I started my first novel after dropping out of UBC’s creative writing program. I’d always said I was going to be a writer, and one time my father told me, “If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better train for another job. Writers don’t earn any money.” So I went into journalism to support myself, and soon found I liked it far better than the creative writing program, which at the time was full of self-important bad boys, by which I mean the professors.

Catsby was affectionate, but he was the dumbest cat I’ve ever had, acting as if he was stoned. He fit the era, anyhow. In one house, several of us watched him lose a battle with a leaf. A wind caught it, setting it twirling, and Catsby leapt two feet in the air. 

Then I went away on a long trip, leaving Catsby with a friend. After a while, he went away too, leaving Catsby with several other people, including a man who fell in love with him. When a friend went over to get Catsby back, the man had a panic attack and stood on his hands to try to calm down. As a result, he got custody of Catsby, and later disappeared with him. Catsby would have been four years old. No one had any idea where the man went.

Gillie thought she might have seen Catsby a few years later hiding in a ditch. She tried to coax him out, but he bolted. 

Pica, the well-travelled cat

After university, I worked full-time for a year at The Sun, then took my savings and travelled around Europe and Asia. I ended up in London, where I rented a bedsit in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, rented an electric typewriter, and set to work finishing my (dreadful) first novel. 

One day in late spring, I was passing through the turnstile at the Notting Hill tube station when I met my former housemate Paul going through a turnstile in the opposite direction, heading home from a movie. He’d spent most of the year backpacking around as well, and he’d come to London to try to find a job on Fleet Street. Guess what happened. 

Paul eventually got a job in Belfast, but I didn’t want to go there. Instead, I moved to Toronto to try to sell my novel to one of the big publishers, planning to get a journalism job to support myself until fame and fortune took care of, well, everything. (Ha!) So I went to work at CBC Radio as a chase producer on the current affairs show As It Happens, which was hosted at the time by Barbara Frum—who, by the way, sometimes made her teenage son David sit in the control room to do his homework, I have no idea why.

Meanwhile, the biggest names in Canadian publishing politely rejected my novel, although Anna Porter kindly suggested I write short stories to try to learn technique. By then, I’d rented a one-room apartment on the top floor of a house on Mutual Street next door to the CBC. After six months, Paul decided to leave Belfast, and wrote asking if he could stay with me until he found a job. 

He’s never left. 

Paul soon got his job, hired at The Globe and Mail. Not long afterward, life struck me as stable enough to get a cat. Paul’s mother didn’t like pets so he hadn’t grown up with them. But he was amenable when the announcer on As It Happens, Al Maitland, told people he had kittens available at his hobby farm east of Toronto. We drove out for a look, and in the loft of Al’s barn, we agreed that one kitten seemed particularly intelligent. We named him Pica, after a unit of measurement in typesetting.

Pica had such a beautiful steel-grey coat that people assumed was a purebred Russian Blue we’d bought from a breeder. He was a lap cat but dignified about it, self-contained and calm. He needed to be, since we moved him all over the Western Hemisphere. In that first top-floor apartment, Pica would climb out the open kitchen window and sit on the roof to survey the neighborhood. After a year, a one-bedroom apartment came open on the main floor, so we moved downstairs and let him out in the scruffy backyard. We weren’t worried, since he mainly wanted to watch: an observer, a journalistic cat. 

Paul and I got married while we lived in that apartment, and were evicted the day after our wedding. Not because of the party, although it was loud. A woman had bought the place so she and her grown daughters could live together, each in her separate apartment. I wonder how well that worked out. We found a new apartment in the east end, and once we decided to have kids, we scraped together everything we had and bought a house not far away. Pica kept watch from windows and fences as we moved around. I got pregnant not long after we moved, and Pica graciously accepted our son when we brought him home from the hospital. I remember him walking slowly toward the baby carrier and giving Gabe a delicate sniff.

When Paul got a Nieman journalism fellowship to Harvard that fall, Pica moved with us to Cambridge. We had an apartment upstairs on Francis Avenue, just down the street from the pink clapboard house where John Kenneth Galbraith lived. We were introduced to him once as fellow Canadians, to which the great economist said, “My back hurts.” His whole front yard bloomed golden with daffodils in the spring, and a black cat hung around, although I don’t know if it was his.

After nine months at Harvard, we moved back to Toronto, then headed to Mexico City a year later when Paul was named The Globe’s Latin America correspondent. We rented a house in the hills beyond Chapultepec Park. It wasn’t that big, but it had been designed by a famous Mexican architect, and it was the most handsome place I’ve ever lived. 

Pica liked sitting in the sun on the stone wall out front near a fall of magenta bougainvillea. He looked so cool he might have been wearing RayBans. He was also bigger than most Mexican cats and became a local attraction. Don Gato, people called him. Hola, Don Gato. Hi there, Sir Cat. There wasn’t any decent cat food in Mexico at the time, so he ate ground chicken. He was very good about allowing our son to play with him, indulging Gabe by chasing string, and letting him pillow his head on his soft grey coat.

After three years, Paul was posted to Brazil, where Pica took possession of the balcony of our apartment in Rio, from which you could hear gunfire over the hill. It didn’t seem to bother him. All this time, I’d been writing. It was my great good fortune that governments didn’t give working visas to the partners of fellows and correspondents unless they lobbied, and I was happy not to. So Pica often slept on the fold-out couch in my study, otherwise known as the guest room. I had plenty of time to spend with our son and to write, churning out short stories published in little magazines, then a book of stories, then what would become my first published novel. 

Yet after a year in Rio, Pica developed kidney problems, and I often had to take him to the vet. He slept more, and sometimes seemed listless. Then one January—high summer in Rio—we went to visit friends in Chile, leaving the housekeeper and Paul’s assistant to keep an eye on Pica. His assistant, Heloïsa, was very fond of cats, and when she thought Pica looked ill, she took him to the vet. 

The vet was unfair, scolding Heloïsa for not bringing Pica in a day earlier. Now he claimed there was nothing to be done, I’m not sure why. Heloïsa was terribly upset, and after the vet put him down, she buried Pica in her grandmother’s garden. So our lovely grey friend was born in a barn outside Toronto and died in Rio de Janeiro when he was 12 years old. He was a particularly excellent cat.

We had four cats after Pica died, but I’m going to break off for now, leaving us poised to return to Toronto in the early 1990s with an eight-year-old son and, temporarily, no cat.

My first cat, Bambi, is fictionalized in my latest novel, Far Creek Road. Well, she’s not so fictional, but the rest is.

The novel is set in 1962, and the main character is Tink Parker, a nosy and very funny nine-year-old living a happy suburban life.

Then the Cuban Missile Crisis hits, and things fall apart. You can get the novel here.