Some of our fondest memories of growing up include a furry four-footed friend. In my house we always had a cat AND a dog. They got along famously. When you moved out of the house after high school or college, weren’t visits back home were all the more welcoming when greeted by your childhood pets?

My first trips home as an adult had the extra benefit of visiting my former kitty, Bubbles (I was 8 when I named her). When she passed on of old age, my mother grieved more for her than I did. She had been just as attached to Bubbles as I had been, although she was considered “Debi’s cat.” I had already moved on to kitties that lived with me throughout my adult life.

After Bubbles, my parents didn’t have any more pet cats themselves. But they always had a dog. My father was partial to dogs and my mother loved them as well as cats. Besides, cats had the nasty habit of killing the birds they liked to watch and feed. They had always had “mutt” dogs and felt they were milder tempered than pure bred dogs. My dad even had a special name for the eclectic breed – one day when he was in the vet’s office, a gentleman with a poodle asked my dad what kind of dog he had. “Why, this here dog is called a Lergnom,” he explained, pointing out the fine breeding that “Peggy” had, as evidenced by her one black ear and one white ear, and the fur on the black ear being much longer than the white. “That there is quite unusual,” he affirmed. The stumped gentleman didn’t know that Lergnom spelled backward is Mongrel.

But in the early 80’s, with all of us kids out of the home, and a couple of years without a feline or canine companion, my parents surprised us all by bringing home a tiny teacup-sized - that they named Duchess Di (after the Princess, of course). Di ruled my aging parents’ household as no other pet had ever done. The sun rose and set on this tiny but mighty dog. And she was a charmer.

Cats and Dogs Make Great Company!

Debra Sorensen, MSW, LISW, CMC, is a professional care manager and owner of Debra J. Sorensen & Associates Inc., a private geriatric care management company serving Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan. She can be reached at 419-367-8835 or e-mail Debra@professionalcareforyou.com.