My Daddy was born and raised in East Texas, in a very rural way. His father was an engineer on the railroad and when they were grown all my uncles were, too. But my Daddy had a longing for more adventure than could be found in the piney woods, so when he was 15 he joined the navy.

When he was a little boy his mother went to a neighboring farmer's house on some errand. The farmer had a newborn calf, whose mother had died, and he had no time to feed or care for it and was going to kill it and my grandmother said, "I'll give you a dollar for her," so he sold her and my grandmother carried her home.

The calf was kept in a box by the kitchen stove for the first days or weeks she was there and walked around the kitchen. It would have been messy having a calf as a house pet so surely it was just days, but I really can't remember. They named her Baby and fed her with a milk soaked rag that she could nurse. I am sure it was a slow and tedious process, wetting the rag and letting Baby suck and wetting it again, but from hearing them all talk about it no one found it so. They found taking care of the little creature satisfying and enjoyable. After awhile they weaned her by taking a bucket of milk or water to her and putting their fingers in it and then the fingers in the mouth lowering her head until her nose touched the liquid and then she would drink.

Shortly Baby took her place outside with the other outside animals and then it was discovered what her close association with the family had done. Baby would not drink on her own. She would stand by the water trough and moo until someone came and put their fingers in the water and lowered her head down and down until her nose touched the water and then she would drink. Ever after that, when she heard the moo my grandmother would yell, "One of you go start Baby", and someone always did.

Once, they found some quail eggs in a nest. They knew somehow the mother was dead, but I don't remember ever being told how they knew. They took the quail eggs and put them under a hen with her eggs and the quails hatched with the little chicks and grew up with them, eating when the feed was scattered and nesting with them at night. But a quail is not a chicken and eventually they abandoned the yard for the fields and the woods, but occasionally when my grandmother was feeding the chickens at night some quail would show up and eat with them and when she saw them my grandmother always knew that they were from the eggs the hen had fostered.

My father had many pets when he was growing up, but the dog he had when he joined the navy was a hound named Villa. Pronounced to rhyme with vanilla. He told me they read about Poncho Villa in the papers and no one knew how to pronounce it then so they called the dog Villa after him, but didn't know it was really pronounced, Vee Ya.

Anyway, when my Daddy left for the train station to go far north to the navy training base at the Great Lakes, where his grandson would also report more than half a century later, they had to tie Villa to the porch to keep him from following my Daddy, but Villa cried and moaned and kept pulling on the rope and then one night chewed through it and took off to find my Daddy, never to be seen again. I often think of that dog sniffing the dusty ground and picking up the scent of the wagon with my Daddy in it and following that scent to find the boy he loved. Did he make it to the train station and lose the scent in the smell of diesel and coal and all the strangers of the town? Did he quarter the fields they used to roam, hoping for a random scent that would lead him on? Eventually did he find another boy, one who was content to stay in the piney woods and not go so far away?

My Daddy found the Great Lakes cold and desolate and he was homesick and the boots they made him wear hurt his feet, because he was most usually barefoot, until the navy. One day he got a letter from my grandmother and that night he sat out on the stoop of the barracks, even though there was snow and the wind was blowing, to read it. It contained family news and town gossip and at the end, she told him about Villa and then she said, in passing, "three quail came to supper tonight". He looked far past me when he told me this story, seeing not me, but Villa and the quail, and the boy he had been. He said, "If I had known the way home I would have gone over the fence, then. Mama never wrote a happy letter."

Many years later he had a family of his own and we lived on the naval base at Cuba. I was very young, but I remember the house some and a long narrow backyard, leading I think to some sort of jungle wilderness. There weren't any houses behind us. There was a feral cat who lived back there that my Daddy fed. She was quite leery and wild and he would put the bowl at the end of the yard, far from the house and sit on the stoop, smoking and watching her eat. He would let me sit by him, but if I moved or chattered he would make me go inside, so I learned to sit as quiet as he.

Gradually, over the weeks he would set out the bowl a few feet closer to the house, ever closer to us, until finally she was eating right by our feet. I learned we were never to attempt to touch her, but to wait for her, and soon she would stand by us and let us rub her head and back, but only my father could pick her up, and she only gave my father the gift of sitting in his lap to groom and take a nap. I think that was the most wonderful thing my father taught me, this gift of patience for and love of animals.

When I was in junior high school we lived in a little pink house in a very large city and my Daddy was retired from the navy. A young, large tomcat lived with us. He was yellow and white and he kept himself so proud and clean his fur was shiny. His name was Big Daddy. I only ever saw my father cry twice in my life. Once was when my grandfather died, but the other was the first time.

It was a sunny morning and I was sitting at the table eating breakfast when my father walked in, carrying Big Daddy like a baby, all limp in his arms. Big Daddy's fur was not shiny, but all dull and dusty and his eyes were half closed. To this day sun shining on a wooden table, or on yellow fur, or one of the cats dusty from rolling in the yard, will bring back that morning to me, and my Daddy crying and saying, "some son of a bitch killed Big Daddy". He had been hit by a car.

Big Daddy was buried in the backyard which had no trees and my mother bought a tiny little sapling, only a foot high, and my Daddy planted it over his grave. We moved away from that house and from Big Daddy, but he was never forgotten. Years later I was in that city on business and decided to try to find our little house. The neighborhood had totally grown and changed and what had been a two lane road that our street ran into was now a four lane thoroughfare, with curbs and drains instead of the grass verge I used to walk along to go to the pool. Houses I remembered were gone, replaced by fancy, expensive modern homes and I was afraid our little street and the little pink house would be gone, too. It was night and I drove by it before I realized it was there. It hadn't changed, but the tree in front of it that I used to climb and sit in to read, was so big and tall I hadn't recognized it. I had been looking for the tree I remembered, but now the place I used to sit was about 15 feet higher than it had been.

I parked across the street and remembered my Daddy and our life in that house, then I looked over the roof and soaring high above the roof was Big Daddy's tree. It had grown so much taller than the house, taller than the trees in other yards, that I could see it from the street. My father was dead, by then, and I could not tell him about Big Daddy's tree. He would have been so pleased.

One night I was talking to my mother on the phone and she told me that Princess had died. "You know," she said, "Princess was the last of Daddy's cats left and now she's gone." I don't think my mother ever made a happy phone call.