The last time I visited my mother, she had sixteen or seventeen dogs. During my high school years, there were also birds. Hundreds of them. And before she met my father, she kept more than thirty cats in a small apartment. She was encouraged in these animal hoarding tendencies from a young age. Mom was five when my grandmother, who was a single parent and worked all day, started sending her alone on the bus into downtown Dallas on Saturdays to have lunch, see a movie, and buy a pet. She came home with puppies and kittens, naturally. And there were bunnies and hamsters and turtles and fish, and God knows what all else.
Granny said there was a monkey who didn’t like to come down out of the curtains. My favorite story was the one about the baby alligator that kept growing and growing until he finally got loose in the neighborhood and was carted off to the zoo. I am not making this up.
My grandmother liked to complain about Mom’s menagerie, but she was an animal-lover, too. In the top photo, she (at left) and her sister Louise (at right) hold some puppies. Below she plays with her dog, “Bingo II,” presumably the replacement for the first Bingo, at Christmastime. And below that she’s the one in the foreground, crouching with some unnamed pooch, while her mother (who also loved puppies) holds the baby and her father waits for the photo to be over.
