Have You Met Comma?

This is my cat. Her name is Comma. She likes to sit on things that are red, white, and black. I think she knows that I love these colors, and I love her, so when she sits on these colors I some how must love her more.



She is a very tiny kitty. When I got her in 2005, she was a rescue from the Spokane Animal Shelter. I had been looking for a cat for about 6 months when I found her in February of that year. She was pretty beat up, like someone had tossed her from a moving car, with road rash on her side, but she was wearing a collar and there was a waiting period of three days before I could have her.


When I first had her at home, I thought she would grow a bit more. The lady at the kennel had looked at her teeth and guessed that she was only four or five months old and would get bigger. When I took her to get de-clawed and fixed the following month, the vet told me that she was much older than that, nearly a year, and would not be getting much bigger. The vet was right.

After I got my much hunted for kitty home the naming process began. The first thing you should know is I have definite views on naming animals: animals should not have people names. Why? After a life time of hearing my name yelled in parks and on streets, only to see a husky or a malamute run to the person yelling, I refuse to name pets with people names. With this in mind, I started casting about for a name that suited this gray cat.

One of the things that struck me about this cat is that she didn't have much of a "meow". It was more like a "meo-" and seemed to stop abruptly in the middle of a thought. I considered naming her synecdoche, but I imagined the vet trying to say that one and quickly moved past it. As I kept listening to this half meow, I asked the cat what was on her mind. Why was she stopping in the middle of a sentence? Then the name "Comma" hit me as perfect. The cat couldn't get past the introductory phrase to her sentence! Like many of my students, my cat thought a phrase could be a sentence, when, really, it could not stand alone. She needed a comma and the rest of her thought. So Comma she became. Not that the vet gets this name right. More than once the vet has asked for "Coma" and looked at me like I was strange to name my pet after a condition where people are, well, comatose.

Comma is a dainty 9 pounds of cat. She wears a red velvet collar with her name in rhinestones. She is aloof, even for a cat, and doesn't like to be pet often. She is, however, a great lover of lap time. But don't you dare pet her when she is on your lap: the point of lap time is to be on the lap, not to be molested by grubby human hands.

She likes the bill of Adam's baseball hats to rub her face on. She also likes Adam. He has her trained to sit on the edge of the sofa and bat at him as he walks by if she wants to be pet. If he tries to leave before she is done being pet, she grabs him with her paw and drags him back.

I just thought you should meet Comma. Besides a fighting fish named Blitskrig she is the only pet that I have ever had as my own.