Well, we had a lot of cats, twenty or more in all but never more than two or three at the same time.  We lived at the blind spot, the dip near the top of the hill, and every spring, once the snow melted and the cars started flying by at 50 or more, it seemed unavoidable; we lost cats, a couple of dogs and even a pony to the traffic on that road.

      Most of our cats, except the real smart ones, didn't last more than a year, but we never would have dreamed it when we first moved in - how were we to know we lived on a cat killing road?  It never stopped us from getting another cat; we couldn't resist, we always got a new cat.  And when we brought it home, it would cower under the couch afraid of everything and crying, and dad would say, "Not another cat."  But by the end of the night, dad would be sitting in his chair with the cat on his lap scratching its ears as it purred.

      When we first moved in, before we were even completely unpacked or settled, we went down to the pound and picked out our first cat and puppy.  We decided to get an adult cat, a mama cat, because we knew that in the long run her kittens had a better chance of being adopted by someone else. no one wants an adult cat, everybody wants a kitten, and she looked like a mama cat my mother once had as a child, long-haired and grey.  So we saved her life and changed her name.

      I can't really remember what we named that cat either except that it started with an "M" and was a girl's name but not Michelle.  I know I'll remember it I think about it long enough.  I guess it was Silver - so much for the "M".

      My mom loved that cat, so after our first winter when Silver got hit by a car, we cried and dug her a little grave at the edge of the yard, collected some of the bigger rocks from the garden and were careful to mow around it when the grass got long.  Then, we began to ask around for a new kitten.

      Ding-a-ling.  I think his name was Ding-a-ling or one of the more derogatory, dumb cat names we invented.  We had an affinity for seven-toed cats and it seems we almost always ended up adopting a kitten from some farmer or the lady at the flower shop who always had multiple litters of horribly inbred, dumb seven-toed, cute fluffy little kittens.  We'd carry home the cutest, dumbest cat with the most toes while the farmer smiled and laughed into his sleeve, I suppose, knowing full well we'd be back the next spring for yet another kitten.  That is, of course, until my sister became old enough to help pick the kitten.  She always picked the ugliest one, the scrawny malnutritioned one with the hernia.  The one nobody else would ever want, and her kittens did live longer.

      We had so many cats it was embarrassing to take our new baby kitten to the vet for its shots, but we wanted to be responsible.  We'd make an appointment and each time the receptionist would ask its name and whether it had seen the doctor before.  We'd say no and she would register our new kitty as a new patient and start a new file on it.   Then, she would begin to ask about all our other more recent cats whose shots were overdue, so she could update their records.  She would shake her head and frown and write something down in red ink, as we shook our heads and sighed, doing our best to avoid direct eye contact, as we told her, "No that kitty's gone too."

      I don't really remember Ding-a-ling that well because I keep getting him confused with another really dumb cat we had, the one that got his face hit by the car and had to have most of his teeth removed.  I think Ding-a-ling was a grey cat, or maybe orange, with a white stomach and medium or kind of longish hair.  It seems strange that I've forgotten his name and even his exact coloring, or maybe not, that's not what's important about him.  I remember him as kind of a symbol of all the pets we had there and maybe that's why he's become more or less a combination of a couple of our cats.

      I remember him best in relationship to our other cat at the time, a sleek orange and white tabby we called Cola or the Cola kid because he had an unusually long tail.  Cola was one of our smarter cats, one of my favorites, most memorable for his ability to make his presence know and his wish to enter the house clear, especially on snowy days when the whole house was locked up and both the outside storm door and the heavy front door were tightly closed.  He would hang at one of the three small windows that bordered the door, by his claws to the molding, crying until we let him in.  We even took pictures of him hanging there like that.

      A hunter, Cola sat watching the bat that had flown down our chimney, fly around the living room as we ran from room to room, closing all the bedroom doors, trying to decide what to do because we didn't have a butterfly net.  Cola solved the problem for us as the bat swooped a little too low over him in the kitchen, and with one paw he reached up and grabbed the bat out of the air, thus creating a second problem.  The vet said we had to keep Cola in the house for 10 days in case the bat had rabies, which could have been transferred to Cola when he bit the bat.  The bat died in a coffee can on top of the refrigerator.  We saved it on the vet's advice, in case Cola started acting funny they could have done an autopsy on it.  We could have sent it to Albany to have an immediate autopsy performed but it would have taken 5 days to get the results anyway.  So we waited.

      Cola didn't contract rabies and lived though he did escape at least once before the 10 days was up.  He was an outdoor cat and hated being inside all day, so I tried to take him for a walk.  He slipped out of my dog's collar and was gone.

      He lived longer than most of our cats and never actually died or more exactly we never found his dead body.  He just disappeared one night.  The same night 2 or 3 of our neighbors up and down the street also lost cats.  We attributed it to a fox or some other, larger animal and not to a cat thief, stealing cats to sell to laboratories for experiments, as one friend suggested.

      Ding-a-ling did not outlive Cola.

      Ding-a-ling used to climb the scrub trees that grew along the edge of the field, between the field and the ditch, to try and catch birds he never caught.  One time he came home with a funny kind of a crook in his tail and we decided it had happened when he fell or he had fallen and been hit.  After that he didn't seem to notice his own tail any longer.  He never washed it, you could squeeze it and he didn't seem to mind and the bend never went away. Then, we noticed it had a crack in it and a fungus or something growing on it near the crook so we took him to the vet.  The vet said it had been broken and had to be amputated.  When Ding-a-ling came home from the vet he just had a bandage wrapped around the stub.  Before we left the office the vet changed his bandage one last time and when my mom saw Ding-a-ling's stub she said, "Oh, poor little Ding-a-ling.  He had such a nice tail.  I'm going to miss it."

      The vet said, "He'll probably miss it a lot more than you do."

      He was never quite the same.

      We change his name almost as soon as we got him home from the vet, if not in the car on the way home.  We had given Cola his name because in Spanish cola means tail and Cola had such a great tail.  With the sarcastic sense of humor inherent in my family, Ding-a-ling was dubbed the Uncola, and it stuck.

      Although he lived for quite some time, little Uncola never got better.  When we got him home, he no longer had complete control of his bowels, so we made him a litter box and assumed it was temporary.  He got worse.  We took him back to the vet a couple of times.  The vet said feed him dry food and no milk, but it was miserable.  He was always dirty and he stank.  Uncola lost the muscle control of his back legs, so that, at first he hopped around and someone said maybe he was pretending to be a manx, like viceroy butterflies pretend to be monarchs so they won't get eaten by the birds.