All my pets seem to have marked an era. Pumpkin was the
involuntary hero who flew with me from the Bay Area to Barcelona on my great
adventure when I moved here in 2001. In fact, he flew with me twice because I
came once in 1999, then again in 2001. He wasn’t a particularly brave cat but
he was capable of enduring what had to be endured. The plane rides weren’t
comfortable for either of us, but I did arrange for him to sit with me in the
cabin, tucked under my feet, turning me into a pretzel and him into a yowling,
unhappy passenger.
Pumpkin came from the Oakland SPCA. How anyone could
surrender or abandon such a beautiful cat is beyond me. When he first came home
with me to the apartment on Vine Street in Berkeley where I lived at the time,
he was a scaredy cat who spent the first few days under the bed.
Pumpkin moved with me from Vine Street to Spruce, later to
Bancroft, then to El Cerrito, then San Leandro, then Barcelona. For a scaredy
cat, he did pretty well as far as traveling and moving home goes.
Pumpkin died an expat cat in Barcelona on 18 October, 2003.
He was about 12 years old and one of the great loves of my life.
