When it comes to cats, our household is, I admit, a bit eccentric.

The family fur ball gene can be traced back to Knox and Frances Craig, the parents of my wife, Amy.  

Some of Amy’s childhood cats had names like Happy Birthday or Noel that indicated when they joined the household.

Other names reflected physical attributes or personalities. Scribbles looked like someone had taken shorthand on his head. Stranger was a white longhaired female who showed up one day during Amy’s childhood and was still around more than 20 years later when I joined the family.

Jocko was one of Stranger’s kittens, whom Knox named after one of the thugs who appeared in the early “Judge Parker” comic strips. Jocko ruled the roost at the Craig home. In fact, one of Amy’s favorite memories is of Jocko perched atop a birdhouse, high up in a tree in their backyard. Like his comic-strip namesake, Jocko met an early demise when he became overly aggressive with the traffic on 30th Street.  

Another Craig family cat was named Gracie May as a kitten, but underwent name reassignment and became Gracie Male when puberty hit and his boy equipment became too obvious to ignore.

During our 40 years of marriage, Amy and I have had 12 cats.

After the first year, we never had fewer than two cats; nor more than six, if you include the Buttons family, which we never really owned, but which showed up in our yard one day 20 years ago, got fixed and moved into a kitty condo that I built on our deck.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to Otis, who was our first cat in 1975, when we moved from Davenport to Des Moines.

Otis was a playful red Persian who slept on my forehead the first night we had him. He loved to run down the hallway of our first apartment and climb the door jam at the end. Once he missed the door jam and wound up in a tub of bathwater that Amy had just drawn.

Another Otis trick was to climb up and curl around my neck when I was on the phone.

When Otis was about a year old, we acquired his half-sister, who had been born on the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976; hence her name, Betsy Ross.

Although Otis and Betsy had the run of our home, they usually hid when friends with small children visited.

To help the cats bond with our own children, Holly and Craig, we placed each baby on the floor soon after arriving home from the hospital. We let Otis and Betsy smell them and lick their bald heads. It worked. To this day, Holly and Craig, along with their spouses, are cat people.

Part of the attraction, for me at least, has been the imagined stories that our cats inspire. By the time Otis and Betsy died – both at the age of 13 about a year apart – Holly and Craig had learned from their mother how to create cat lore.

As a result, Tibby, the flood kitten we adopted in 1993, wasn’t just a stray who spent an inordinate amount of time in the basement. She was Dr. Tibbs, a nuclear physicist who conducted experiments down there with her mice lab assistants.

Similarly, the black cat that showed up a few years later with her kittens became named Mrs. Buttons and was given the backstory of a French war bride whose husband never returned from the front.  

We still have one of Mrs. B’s daughters, Teeny, the runt of the litter, who now holds court in our bedroom as Justice Teeny Bader Ginsberg.