Author: Michele B. Naquaiya

One upon a long time ago, this was my sweet white cat. I had never had a cat before and here is the story of how she came to me. My love and I rented a very tiny apartment in New Haven, Ct. It was the home of Yale University and the home of what was WNHC TV at the time. We were both working at the tv station. He was selling time over the phone to New York advertising agencies. I was preparing the logs for the following day. I remember typing the log schedules on a big loud machine that were printed on huge mylar sheets. Sometimes I had to run the logs off for emergency changes. Life events happened: clients would buy drive time slots at a high price and they would get pre-empted if there was a national emergency or other local event important enough to cancel. Then I would scurry the edited logs down to engineering to make sure the announcer could get them on time, and the editor could patch and switch to live broadcasting. It was my then boyfriend’s job to schedule a make good commercial time zone at a compensation price the client would accept. This was a hard and fast moving job and he was great at it. It was around 1965 or ’66.
It was an intense time with an intense atmosphere. We always had a full day and looked forward to relaxing in our tiny apartment. In those days, we had a little square portable tv and we used to enjoy Saturday morning cartoons together. Since it was an attic remodeled as an apartment they put the bathroom in the low end of the flat. When you got one third into the room, the ceiling immediately slanted down pretty steep. Careful not to bump your head getting in an out of the tub.
One Saturday we were just hanging around figuring out what to do wih our free two days. We would most likely go for a walk and buy Italian subs for lunch and maybe eat in the park. I looked out the window to the apartment building across the way.
There was a wire that I remember as a phone or utility wire connecting the two buildings. There she was, a beautiful white cat, very heavily pregnant walking across the adjacent tenament to our building on a skiny wire. I thought I was seeing things but it was true. She kept looking at me and balancing with every step of her four paws, carefully making her way across the skinny wire getting closer and closer. She waddled right into our little apartment with every intension of staying.
How odd, delightful and scarey was this? That night she had kittens on the bathroom rug. I had never seen anything like that. She was the first animal I called “mine”. She was happy to be there. She was not really a guest as she ended up staying with me for another twelve years and she traveled across 2,000 miles with us and we all settled in California.
The Illustration “White Cat in Italy” is how I remember her. Delicate and blue eyed, sweet and a fabulous friend. I created the art in Leonardo AI, thinking of how she would have fit right into a little village in Italy instead of a town in Connecticut.