I have a very good memory. I can remember things that happened to me I should have been too young to remember now. I remember my first step (I made it to the stairs, and I fell down them). I remember the moment I knew I did not want to drink from a bottle any more (I found the sensation of the rubber in my mouth stomach-turning. My Mom says I could not have been older than 2).

I remember my father's huge veiny hand holding a tabby kitten under a hot water tap to de-louse his fur – we were too poor to take animals to the vet, or to buy treatments. I would have been about two and a half. I don't remember the story of how he came to our house, but my father has told me.

We were driving up the Nor'west Road, almost in Sevogle. Dad looked into Buzzy's yard, and knew he had to stop.

Buzzy was about 5'2, wiry, with a big red beard and purple skin from whiskey. People called him Yosemite Sam, and this was just as much for his temper as it was for his look. Buzzy was holding a shot gun at his side. His son, Dale, 9, was holding a wooden box. Dale tossed the box into the air, somewhat miraculously without having it fall back down on his small body. Buzzy aimed and shot at the box. This looked to be the last of several attempts.

Buzzy's old cat had given birth again, and this was his inspired, drunken scheme to get rid of them. My Dad opened the box, to find one bug-eyed kitten amongst mangled and bloodied fur. He came home with us. I named him Buzzy. I remember that part, but I didn't remember why and I can't explain why. My sense of irony was simply not that well honed at age 2.

Buzzy the cat died last Spring. He'd been blind for some time, for years when you picked him up, his body had lacked that fluid, flexed sensation that most cats have, and he had stopped grooming himself or even standing when he had to void his bladder. His legs made cracking noises. He spent all his time against a heater. Brown sludge began to accumulate in the corners of his mouth, like seeping death.

I pleaded with my parents through a Southeast Asian calling card to put him out of his misery. My father was despondent, angry. We'd had that cat for almost as long as we had been a family, and to him we were desperate to kill him off.

Buzzy the cat had cheated death until he was 23. It is only appropriate that he was finally shot. Dad did it