The "mischievous or tricksy goblin or sprite" at two months. [Click to enlarge]

This columnist tries to avoid the quotidian and the personal. "The present writer" (as, he stuffily calls himself) reckons enough others, plumb up to the K.C. Star's C.W. Gusewelle, are interminably beavering away keeping those two interminable topics covered.

Of many a one could it be said, as my father liked to, "Take the word 'I' out of his vocabulary and he'd be tongue-tied!" Gusewelle scorned the likes of "the present writer" as a cop-out. "I put a lot of myself in my writing," he said in justification of his enamorment of "I.". Just why he should put a lot of himself in, he didn't add. Or above all why readers should want him to do so. As indeed they do, since clearly he and his likes don't lack for readers. Theirs is the journalistic spirit of the age: Informal, laid-back, folksy. Lightweight.

Being of the older journalism school, the late, great Ken Postlethwaite once begged readers' pardon for straying, for a first and last time, from the "editorial we."

I'm not apologizing, merely noting the present effort as an exception to a principled rule. (Anything worth saying is worth saying with seriousness, dignity, and at least a stab at objectivity. The trouble is, most of what's said, and written, isn't worth doing in the first place.) I even have a Gusewelleian example before me. Any writer of an occasional "me-and-my-cat" tale can be forgiven the rest of his numbing quotidianness and first-person-singularity!

My young-man's-best-friend was Ginger, a female English springer spaniel. And one of my great growing-up milestones was the triumphant bringing up of a baby squirrel, an experience highly recommended for young humans, if not necessarily for young squirrels.

But my defining acquaintance with the animal kingdom clearly has been that with felines. No point in my days has ever been cat-less. ("A house is not a home" obviously refers to a house without that requisite adjunct, a house-cat.) And ours were always toms. A cat isn't "she" to me by default, as to most, so it seems. Years of welcoming home carousing cat-Casanovas, bloody-but-unbowed, an ear perhaps dangling by a thread, or watching our Toughy make a sport of beating up mastiffs, for me leaves "feline" and "female" anything but synonyms.

And the word "stray" simply doesn't fit the haughty, however plebeian, feline who deigns to adopt you, as it does the groveling canine whom, conversely, you adopt. And mine were all of that take-'em-as-they-come ilk till last August when, in a fit of stark raving decisiveness, I up and blew a bundle on a registered "red-point Himalayan" kitten.

There he was, a pound or so of snow-white powderpuff with blue eyes and "points" more pink than red. Inviting the stock greeting of visiting women: "You're pretty enough to be a girl!"

To my dismay or disgust, if not his. I can't see it. A girl, with those pingpong-paddles (or maybe prickly-pear pads) for paws, and that snooty pie-face already suggestive of a champion pugilist's, almost down to cauliflower ears? A girl, stubby all over: Ears, legs, tail, accordion-like middle, all too stubby for a furbearing beefcake already ballooned up to 10 pounds?

Poets have waxed endlessly eloquent on cat's eyes, those most eloquent of eyes, which do seem more truly those "soul-windows" all eyes are supposed to be. The hardbittenest skeptic and cynic will find it hard to engage in a staring contest with a cat's eyes, above all blue ones, and not come away no longer so sure a soul, a spirit, a something, something more than the mere animate matter of biologists, may not lurk in there behind them after all.

Out of this notion the new family member's name fairly nominated itself. Himalayans are known for mischievousness, and the name of Shakespeare's mischief-making "Puck" had already been under consideration; but "puck" it turned out was a generic, lower-case creature long before Shakespeare made him a particular, capitalized one. "A fancied mischievous or tricksy goblin or sprite," says the Oxford English Dictionary; "an evil, malicious, or mischievous spirit or demon." And an alternative form of the name, it goes on, is "pook."

Folks with ragbag memories may remember Kipling's story "Puck of Pook's Hill." Or at least Jimmy Stewart's invisible friend "Harvey" in the movie of that name, introduced by Jimmy as a "pookah:" yet another form of the same word, which is of unknown origin, and may even be related to "spook." One way or another, then, "Pook" he was and is. Those "pretty enough to be a girl" gals keep trying for "Pooky," but Pook and I, we're having none of it.

One of the ancient Latin writers laments the habit, rife among the decadent upper class in declining-and-falling Rome, of lavishing affection on animal pets that rightly belonged to human children.

He had a point. The plummeting birthrate of the Roman governing class was certainly one of the causes of the fall. Children they saw as a nuisance, an obstacle to self-indulgence, the materialistic, hedonistic life their prosperity now enabled them to lead. Then, finding such a life emotionally and spiritually impoverished, intolerably so, they tried to fill the emptiness with pets. They fancied they'd get the same satisfaction from animals as from children, with a lot less in the way of trouble and obligations. They were wrong all around, of course.

Britons and Americans are notorious among other peoples for their passion for their pets and other animals. British governments have been brought down by sentimental episodes involving a single animal fancied to have been abused or neglected. To other peoples, even other Westerners, such an attitude is simply incomprehensible. Eastern faiths may counsel kindness toward animals; but these same creeds counsel kindness toward women. In practice both get pretty short shrift. (In the Arabian Nights one man shows another how to manage a mulish wife: He beats his mulish donkey; doesn't just beat him and stop, but goes on beating him till it's too much even for the stoic donkey. The moral: Go home and do likewise by wifey.)

Is the Anglo-Saxon love-affair with pets the same pathology as afflicted declining Rome? Do we have more pets, and treat them better, as we have fewer children, and perhaps slight those we have? Not necessarily, for quite often children and pets go together, big happy families. And the proper care of animals can be a vital part of the rearing, the civilizing, of children.

And certainly pets contribute to the well-being of the old without taking anything from the total fund of societal energy and resources. They've already had their children, if any. Of course they might all start leaving everything to the pets, who often prove to be the more faithful friends. It's remarkable the rewards, the not-always-small satisfactions, afforded by the companionship of even that most selfish, contrary, cranky, maddening of critters, the cat.

Yes, Pook. It's past suppertime, I know. Take those cutlass claws out of my lap and I'll hurry out and serve up your liver and sirloin tips.