[With a cat — Dilly, I’m told, but to me the stripes
rather say, Nameless — sometime in 1993.]
Dilly first entered the life and home of The Missus-to-be sometime in the spring of 1993, shortly after I myself moved down here and some months before we moved in together.
As with her predecessor, Nameless, Dilly probably would have gone anonymous for a while — we’re notoriously indecisive about most things, singly and as a couple — except for one happy circumstance. She needed happy accidents at that point, too. She’d been in the animal shelter with her little brother; The Stepdaughter-to-be had gone there with a friend who was looking to adopt. The friend pointed the two little kittens out. (As I recall, the backstory to that point was that Dilly and her brother had been abandoned by the side of the road.) The Stepdaughter-to-be, on behalf of her mother, “adopted” Dilly. (To this day, she remains haunted by uncertainty about whether the little brother got adopted, too.)*
When she arrived at The Missus’s place, then, the kitten still had on one foreleg the ID bracelet from the shelter: D1L, it said, and voilà — with the substitution of a letter for a digit, she had a name.
(She acquired a couple nicknames over the years. Dillybutt, for one — a reference to the “elevator butt” that kicked in when you so much as approached with an about-to-pet-her hand, sometimes when you merely spoke her name. Later, there was Dilgoyle: the cat who’d be sitting on a windowsill, as if carved there, when we got home from work or a trip.)
