Our New Cat

Once, when we were about 9 years old, my sister brought home a stray cat. It was all black, with one white spot on it's forehead. (And one crazy eye that would wander.) We immediately fell in love with the mangy thing. My mother, on the other hand, was not too happy. She tried to convince us that it was a skunk and would spray us all, at the first sign of trouble. (I actually caught her trying to draw a chalk line down the cat's back. To further enforce the notion that we actually did caught a skunk and not a cat. We did not fall for this.) Eventually, she gave up, and we had a new cat. The only rule that she imposed was that we were to feed, care, bath the cat ourselves. We agreed.
That lasted about a week.
She soon became the sole caretaker of the cat. She acted like she despised the cat, but as time went on, she became attached.
The best part of all?
We named the cat Mo-Fo. And, because my mother spoke mostly Spanish, she just thought it was a cute name made up by her adorable children.
I have vivid memories of my mother, in her tattered house dress, opening the back door every evening. She would slam the creaky screen door a few times, hoping the cat would recognize the sound as the dinner bell. After a few minutes she would start calling out for our cat.
Screaming "MO-FO!"
"MOO-FOOOOOO!"
"MOOOOO-FOOOOOOOOOOO!"
Until the damn cat would come home for it's dinner. It still makes me giggle.




Yeah. We were bad kids.