Table for one, please  − 1 August, 1999

As my best friend and I moved into our first home away from home (a smoky one-bedroom near the outskirts of town), her mom decided it was high time I get a cat.

I grew up with cats. First there was Oreo, who had kittens when we lived in Kentucky, one of which we kept - Tubs. I vaguely recall being around for the birthing process, but I definitely remember standing up to the rest of my family in my efforts to name Tubs after a character from He-man or She-ra.

Both cats left us (that's another story), and it was a few years later when I received Licorice, a black short-hair cat, for my 8th birthday from my friend Nellie. I remember being handed a towel-covered box and being asked what I thought it was.

"A bird?" I guessed, wide-eyed to everyone's laughter.

When I finally gathered up the nerve to stick my hand into Mystery Box, I retrieved a small, shy little kitten that stayed a part of my life for nearly 18 years.

But back to Amanda and I and our new license on freedom. Amanda's mom presented me with a tiny, black-and-white stray that had wandered into our old high school and remained unclaimed for weeks. She had worms and fleas and all those fun, vet bill-inducing issues that go along with animal neglect, but boy was she a little ball of fur. She would fly around the apartment, scare the crap out of herself with a piece of lint, and then go running up the wall - literally. She just must be used to being a stray, we reasoned, and kept a watchful eye on all water glasses (of which she always paused to stick her face in), dangling phone cords, homework (which, yes, she ate), and toilet paper (also ate).

Many times I would come home from class to a shredded phone book, broken window blinds, and the phone off the hook, but it wasn't until a few months when Ruby started with the sink. Or, rather, the things we put in the sink. First it was the sponge. She would drag the sponge down from off the sink and proudly hold it over her head and she stumbled towards us, her little body smaller than the cleaning pad. The next month, it was the dishwasher. For some reason, she thought it was a good time to crawl underneath the blade in the dishwasher and just sit and stare at us trying to coax her out.

But the best of them all is when she started leaving me presents at my closed bedroom door. Each morning, I would wake up not to find a dead mouse or injured rabbit. No. I would find a fork. Or a plastic cup. Some days, it would be a spoon or that good old sponge. The finale, though, was when I opened the door, still weary from lack of sleep and another college party, to find a knife, fork, and spoon laid out perfectly before me. Breakfast, apparently, was about to be served.

Looking back, as Ruby purrs contently on top of my keypad, I think Amanda's mom sent Ruby to remind us to wash our dishes.