My family always had pets, because let’s face it, pets are literally the best things in the world. Whether it be a cat, dog, hamster or a chameleon, they all provide a source of comfort and responsibility. (I say chameleon because I once had one. It was an interesting experience.) When I was really young, maybe from when I was five to 11 or 12 years old, we had this dog. His name was Woody. He was this little brown and white Corgi, and he was one of my favorite people ever. He had the gentlest eyes. When you spoke to him and told him things, it’s like he understood what you were saying to him. It was wild. When I was a little kid, I felt like he just got me. It felt like he knew what I was going through and was very empathetic and understanding. I know that sounds weird, but you come up with these things when you’re a small child. The way he presented himself was also very proper. He used to walk with one paw in front of the other. He would wobble a little bit because of it, but that’s OK. When he would lie down, he used to cross his little front paws like he was expecting dinner guests. These little things about Woody made him seem more sophisticated. I knew that he was only a dog, but dogs have personalities. They have personalities that you can see through the way they act and the things that they do, just like people. This is why I call them people. They’re little friends.

Whenever you ask someone what kind of dog they have, for some reason, a lot of people take some kind of weird pride in their dog being a purebred, perfect little angel. Especially people who have really big dogs or small dogs, like people who have purebred Pomeranians, Pugs or Pit bulls. But when you ask someone what kind of cat they have, most people are like “I don’t know? This one?” Unless it’s a Maine Coon cat, or a Siamese cat or something like that. Then there are the people who take weird pride in having weird mixes of dogs like Puggles and Golden doodles. I just think that the difference between cat people and dog people is funny.

Before you judge and think this is really

corny, I know it is. My mother liked to name our pets very corny names. Definitely nothing like Fluffy, or Mittens, or anything like that, but still. The next pet we had was Pepper. He is an all black cat. The plan was to get two cats the day we got Pepper, actually. One cat for my older sister Kristin, and one for me; a black cat and a white cat, Salt and Pepper. I guess I was being particularly rotten that day and didn’t get a cat. I didn’t know about it until after we got home from the shelter that day and was really angry that my sister got a cat and I didn’t. Anyway, I call him Bubby, or Bub for short. Now he’s about 12 or 13 years old, and it’s really sad to think that he doesn’t have a lot of time left. I actually got a tattoo in his honor. He is literally the cutest little person I’ve ever seen in my life. He has so much love to give and is so cute that it breaks my heart whenever I have to leave him again. Whenever there is sunlight coming into the room, he is laying in that square of sunlight. When I breakdown and cry, he’s always there to mush me and sit with me. He’s very good at making me feel better. Sometimes he’ll just have these random surges of energy and will jump up and dart around the room chasing the other cats or just running by himself. All of our cats have always been indoor cats for as long as I can remember. Bub is that indoor cat that hung out by the door when people are coming into or leaving the house waiting for his chance to break free. He loves being outside. When he was a baby and he got outside, he would run as fast as he could to get away from us chasing him. It was like a game to him. He would avoid us, run and climb trees. He’s grown soft in his old age. Now if he gets outside, he’ll run for a minute, but if you just crouch down and make kissy noises to him, he’ll come right over and let you pick him up to take him inside the house. Since we knew how much he liked to be outside, my mom and I used to try to put a collar on him and take him for walks when my sister was at school, but it never worked out. He would always get out of the collar. A couple of years later, we tried again, but this time we changed it a little bit. We got a harness that was pretty snug, but not too snug, hooked him to the rope attached to the porch that we used to let the dog outside. He ended up getting out of the harness somehow. I guess Bub is smarter than your average cat. Taking pictures of Bubby is very hard. He’s not very photogenic. It’s not that he’s not cute, it’s just that he likes to know what you’re doing. He also likes to mush the camera lense so whenever you try to take a picture of him, you end up getting a really close up picture of his face or his ear or something weird. At the very least, you always get an interesting picture of him.

Pets are truly man's best friend. We take them for granted and get mad a lot of the time. Where would we be if we didn't have them? Just look at the Egyptians, they worshiped cats. They even made the decision sometimes to be buried with their cats. Sometimes the cats were still alive when they buried them with their humans, but that's just how much love they had for their cats.