I don't talk about cats unless someone brings up the subject and even then I'm somewhat bemused. Like talking about children. A fascinating subject I suppose if you have some. Nothing worse than a couple of old coots gushing over their grand kids like junkies turned loose in the back room of a pharmacy.

I have cousins and a sister with children, a pretty good lot overall, and I have friends with children as well. One had a son who robbed a Seattle bank with a shotgun in the late 1960's at the age of 12, well before kids that age began to make the news. The FBI expressed concern, of course, but was also, I think, somewhat bemused, busting, as they had, the youngest kid to ever knock over a Seattle bank, their names forever etched in the FBI record books.

They caught him pretty quick, both of them actually, he had a 13 year old accomplice. No one was hurt, although his mother was freaked. The lack of ammunition in their guns probably helped their case. I heard he's turned out just fine, a good level headed citizen with kids of his own. For me, kids are high maintenance items. I've never had the stomach or the nerve or the ambition so at a party when the subject comes up, I've passed, and wandered into another room.

My family owned dogs. An Irish Setter was the first, a bird dog named Laddie who suffered from chicken lust. My father sent him to dog training school where they put him in a pit with a trainer and three chickens. Dog sees chickens, dog goes after chickens, trainer throws big fire cracker in front of dog, boom, dog no longer kills chickens, please pay the cashier. The trainer's chickens had been through this so many times they practically didn't notice the dog or the firecrackers any more and concentrated instead on eating the corn that the trainer had scattered on the ground.

Laddy never batted an eye, killing the chickens quick and clean, firecrackers exploding around his nose. I was there with my father when the trainer shook his head in wonder: "He never stopped, he never flinched, he killed my chickens before I could move."

Laddie was a pure bred, bred for the hunt. He knew chickens and ducks and geese through generations under the gun. In retrospect he may have learned more about explosions than was good for him hanging out with me every July on the 4th, the firecracker kid, one boom after another, pass the fried chicken please for me and my dog, watch out for the bones.

We left Laddie at the pound. I remember driving away, leaving him behind. He was a beautiful dog for a kid to have and I hope someone took him to a place where there were no chicken owning neighbors to complain with a pasture in the back and a family to defend. Not someone like me who lives in a city, no neighbors with chickens, of course, and who would love him well enough, but no longer has room.

Cats I met through Nancy. Not the later Nancy who was my lover and my friend, but another Nancy I'd met when I first worked downtown. She'd been a reporter for the Chronicle and was going through a divorce. She was 30 and I was 29 and I remember that made a difference to her. She never said, but I knew. She had an apartment on Telegraph Hill overlooking the bay and we got to know each other in the summer of 1972. One day she turned and asked me what I thought about cats. A simple question casually asked.

I thought for a moment. It was clear the question asked in the morning would determine whether she would still know me in the afternoon. And I thought: Well, I've never asked myself that question. Do I like cats? Why not? Not "do I like cats well, I'd better like cats if I want to bed this wench after dinner tonight so yes, I do", but rather did I really like cats? And I thought, well, why not?

"Yes", I said, and, although I had never owned a cat, knew nothing about cats, I liked them and later owned them from that day on.

This was not Nancy's happiest hour. Her life was in a shambles and this divorce business had gotten her down, while I, in retrospect, was learning my own terrible truth. She was living on martinis in the mornings and feeding her cat, a Siamese, fried liver in the afternoons. We parted long ago. I hope she is well with low cholesterol cats in her house and thank her for asking me then: "Do you like cats?"

"Why yes, I do."