By Joan L. Cannon

Reams have been written about how animals — pets, in most cases — contribute to the comfort of human lives. Most of us have wept over Flag in The Yearling, Black Beauty, Old Yeller, and many more. Even unfortunate city kids have an inkling of what fur-bearers offer in tacit sympathy and devotion. They see homeless people hugging a stray and get the message. The more fortunate have known a number of animals intimately.

One of the things about animals to me is their place as memory triggers. Our family has a small number of members who are unaware of what they've been missing all their lives, and it makes me wonder if it's too late to show them. My son-in-law is allergic to cats. I don't know about his sons, who are polite to our dogs. No one in that group seems ever to have wished for a pet. It makes me nervous about their children, should they ever have any. Certainly I'll never forget my mother taking a switch to my legs when she caught me trying to frighten our cat our from under a bush where he'd hidden. There was no answer to her question of how I'd like that, as I rubbed my stinging calves.

He was followed by a big black and white female improbably called Snowball. While we had her, I acquired a reject from the biology lab's nutrition experiments in what would now be called middle school. A white rat still showing evidence of malnutrition that I named Confucius. He loved to ride on my shoulders under my hair that was clipped at the nape with a big barrette. He would poke his pink nose and pinker eyes out under one of my ears and let his tail hang out under the other.

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