The Day My Life Changed Forever

Black Patches was a cat, of that there is little doubt; beyond this though, there are…well not mysteries exactly, more like uncertainties. Where she came from, for instance, is not recorded in any record, even the informal census of pet births and deaths that is kept in the fragments of our childhood memory. My mom loved this mongrel cat, perhaps she remembered how and when she came into our lives, but if she did, she took that bit of trivia, as well as all so much of the family lore, with her to the grave.

Mom’s love for this particular cat — this one, solitary cat, when cats came and went from our lives with the same frequency of a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk — was rooted in my mom’s love of motherhood. You see, what impressed my mother about Black Patches was that Black Patches was a good mother. My mom named this decidedly homely cat, Black Patches, admittedly a name bereft of any sort of poetry, or quaintness, or any of the esoteric qualities typical of a pet name. It wasn’t a name she always wanted to give a child that she never bore, nor was it a name of a famous person or place that she read about as a child and longed to meet or visit. Mom and Dad were farm-folk, in a real sense, none of this “one-day I’m gonna leave this little town behind and BE SOMEONE, Nebraska-horse shit” you see on television.