Cuing Baker Street

Little girl climbed onto the kitchen chair. Mommy stood at the counter, ready for the next ingredient. The huge cook book with the red and white gingham cover laid open on the table. Little girl started drawing with a number two lead pencil. Big heads with arms and legs, no bodies, wearing glasses. A smaller head, no glasses and they all had smiles.

"Tell me the story while I make this new dessert," Mommy urged.

"Sure. This is you and Daddy," the girl pointed out. Along with the glasses, they had curly hair. Her finger reached the girls with flipped hair that was the style, thanks to Dippity Doo. "Those are my sisters." One more with shorter hair and glasses, "This is Brother." She looked up and smiled, waiting for the approval she knew would come.

"I see. And who is that little one without glasses?"

"Why that's me." She put her head back down to the margin and added a cat with stick legs. Lifting her head, she twisted her tongue outside her mouth and drew a dog, looking similar to the cat. "I made Muffy and Lassie."

"What are we doing?"

"Hmm," Little Girl cocked her head and then drew a car, of sorts, with huge tires. All in the margin of a cook book by the recipe Mommy had been reading. "We're going for a ride to Pymatuning and Daddy will get us ice cream."

"I think that will be fun. Maybe we'll do on Sunday. I don't think the dog and cat would enjoy the trip, though."

"I guess not. But I wish I had a pet that would travel with me."

One night, very dark in late November or December, they found a house on a hill overlooking Swamp Road. Little Girl always looked for distractions from going to all day school in first grade. She relished them. She had to learn to not write in the library books, like she did with all the ones before school. She added glasses to all the characters, like bunnies, cats and puppies. Even Br'er Rabbit had glasses, but not in the tar pit.

That night, they brought home a new pet. A miniature dauschand, originally named Micky. Mommy didn't like that name, so it was changed to Nicky. But although Nicky loved the family, he was not Little Girl's pet. He was a hunting dog and so Brother had the most time with him. Little Girl learned on a trip to the huge bridge they were building, that blood drove Nicky crazy. A dog, who went on road trips, but this time, the car hit a deer. They had to roll up windows quickly and Little Girl's eyes opened wide.

"He's a hunter. That is natural. Instinct for him," Mommy explained.

Little Girl realized Nicky wasn't one of her stuffed animals or like the animals in children's books. But she still wanted a pet of her own.

She found a big toad one day. She named him Freckles. She loved watching his throat expand and contract with his breathing. Nicky licked him one time. White froth bubbled from his mouth."Toads are poisonous to dogs." She can't remember if it was Daddy or Brother who sternly reprimanded her and threw the toad over the garage roof, but she never found Freckles or a big toad like him again.

On an early fall day, as she entered the dining room from the side porch, a neighbor sat with her mom at the table. The women grinned at her. Mommy said, "There's a surprise for you under the table."

Curled up on a chair, hid by the tablecloth, lay a Siamese kitten, with a milky body and black tips. He turned his head at her thrill of delight, showing jewel blue eyes in a black mask. Little Girl's heart melded that day with her kitten. She had read in a story, if you stared into a cat's eyes for five seconds, you bonded for life.

She eagerly did that. He didn't look away and neither did she. He, too, came with a name that she wanted to change. Ho Chi Minh, the given name from the soldier who gave the kitten to his sick mother. After a few weeks, the kitten was too much for her, so she called Mommy asking if her little girl wanted a kitten. Mommy had to ask Daddy, who said yes. Little Girl wanted to call him Kim because she had read a story with that name. Kim would not answer. He already knew his name. So Ho Chi Kim, became his official name.

Ho Chi had doglike qualities and as such the family tended to treat him like a dog. They leashed him. He cried, and I mean cry like a baby, to come in and he rushed straight to the litter box. He played board games with Little Girl. The next summer, he followed her next door to the new church. With no screens yet in the low laying windows, he easily sauntered into the church. He smelled around, walked by the altar.The cat shocked the Sunday school class in the back. They tracked down the little girl to get her cat. Another time, she had to rescue him from a Sunday school room. She laughed at the teachers holding up the children in their arms, staring into the empty room through the window.

The rumor got around, probably from Walt Disney, that Siamese were mean. Ho Chi was as gentle as, well, a kitten. Little Girl loved him. Yet, a pet of her own, maybe it was after Nicky didn't survive a direct hit by a car, remained a dream. He was the family cat.

She wrote and illustrated a story, with pages, of getting three dogs for her birthday. A fantasy writer at nine years old. She didn't continue that venue. She wrote modern stories about relationships. That first story about generous friends could fit in a relationship exploration. Maybe she should in later life analyze those friends.

Little Girl grew up. Along with wanting a pet of her own, writing also was a dream. Life threw some curves as it does and she felt the need for practicality. Her father, due to an accident, with the option of early retirement, left the steel mill, that provided a wonderful life for the family. This taught her, you can't depend on a man to have the job. The eighties brought that more to the point. The military or moving to Texas seemed to be the meal ticket. She graduated from nursing school and married a sailor, a submariner, in the same weekend.

Writing remained a dream. Her own pets, cats, came much easier. She finally had a cat, all her own, who loved to curl up beside her and watched her like a handmaid to her mistress. Miss always wrote, but never believed she'd be published. It happened much later and not out of her room on Main Street. The first novel, set in the house she grew up in, the house of dreams, the house that means much more than even a home. Dreams live and breathe. Please feed them.