Mom and Dad and Tommy and Kathy in Tommy and Kathy's Kitchen Having Dinner, 1987

I wasn't there that night, but I know this kitchen well. I had many a Christmas Eve dinner there in the 1970s and early 1980s, all many years before this picture was taken in the late '80s.

According to the timestamp on the picture, which I have cropped off in the version posted here (as I have cropped off the dog, at which Mom was looking when the shutter was snapped), this photograph was made a couple of days after Dad's birthday that year – 1987, when he turned forty-three. What we see here, then, is, I'm pretty sure, a Birthday Dinner; probably that year Dad's birthday fell on a weeknight or some night when Mom and Dad or Tommy and Kathy had other plans, so they celebrated my dad's birthday shortly after his actual birthday.

I'm not sure who took the picture, but there is in the picture some evidence of that person's presence: five chairs at the table, though only four people sit at it; five glasses of tea on the table; five plates; etc. Someone clearly rose, camera in hand, and recorded the night for posterity, as they recorded a few other scenes from that night, but I don't know who that camera-wielding person was.

Other things I don't know: Where I was, or Jeff, or my cousin Rick, that night. However, I do know this: By then we were all teenagers and surely not interested in having dinner with our parents, and too old to be made to do so.

This photograph was made twenty years before Tommy's passing in his late 50s. The house is no longer in the family, but it's still standing, and I drive by it periodically and marvel at how much it's changed. (That's true, actually, of a great many places.) I would love to see the inside of it, to see how much it's changed; I believe that the company that bought the property uses the house as an office, and I doubt it's changed dramatically, the living room and bedrooms making good offices as they were. I have great memories of going there and seeing Tommy and Kathy and playing with Ric. It is one of the important places of my youth, and I treasure the memory of it.

Me and Spike, 1973; Me and Pookie, 1978

I'm not really what you'd call a dog person.

Not that you have to buy into the artificial binary of "dog people" and "cat people." I've known plenty of people who love both, perhaps even have one (or more!) of each as a companion. And some people don't like either; it's weird, they say, to let an animal have free reign in your home and even sleep in your bed. Sometimes I see it that way myself.

But most of the time, I'm a cat person.

Not in the Val Lewton sense, of course, but if I am going to give an animal free reign in my home and let it sleep in the bed with me, I would much prefer it be a cat than a dog. In fact, Anna and the kids and I do have three cats, all of whom do have free reign in our home and sometimes do sleep in the bed with us (until they get kicked out of the bedroom for pouncing on people who are trying to sleep), and zero dogs. Before we had kids, Anna and I had six cats (yes, all at the same time). We've never had any dogs, and don't intend to get any anytime soon.

However, I must say that a dog was a great pet to have for a little boy.

The first picture is me and my first dog, Spike, probably in about 1973 before I'd even started first grade. I didn't have Spike for long – as I remember it, the backyard of our house in Lilburn wasn't fenced in, and he just had that small corner to live in (you can't see it in this picture, but Dad built a little lumber and chicken-wire pen for him), and he got wild and unmanageable as he got older, and eventually Dad took him to the pound.

Pookie, the dog you see in the second picture, came to live with us shortly after that. We had the yard fenced in, and Pookie was my constant companion for the next…well, many years, until I lost interest in dogs and got more interested in guitars and science fiction and the other things that can sometimes pull a boy away from his dog. Nonetheless, as I remember it, Pookie was with us until after I graduated from college, more than sixteen years. I've never had another dog, but I have had lots of cats.

So, though I may now be a committed cat person, I started life as a dog person, which is just how I think it was supposed to be. Pookie was a great dog and, even if I don't want a dog in my life now, I'm glad I got to grow up with him.