From the “If You Ever Wondered How 3M Got Rich” Dept:
The latest gallery in The Attic is from a photo album spanning Dad’s favourite memories from 1946-1969…think of it like that history survey book you read in school that breezes through the decades! Only with a massive amount of cellophane tape that had to be one of the most profitable quarters in 3M’s history which you will see in a fair heap of these photos.
This gallery starts with some school pictures and then heads on to a summer spending time in Florida on holiday and a rather sizeable religious retreat called the Beulah Camp where the family had their own dedicated cabin. Then there are the galleries for life in Hutsonville and Raleigh before Dad takes off for the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
There’s even a brief foray into my hometown of Fayetteville NC right before I was born (OK, technically I was born on Fort Bragg at Womack Army Hospital for the grand sum of $7.12 all inclusive!) where you get to meet our pet Siamese cat named Kismet.
And never in the history of man has a pet had a more appropriate name! Kismet comes to us from the Arabic word “kismat” which would literally be “the will of Allah” but is more commonly translated as “destiny” or “fate”.
My father had a rather chequered history with the cats that have owned us through the years. He was not really a fan of any of them and if Sylvester’s reaction was anything to go by, the feeling was quite mutual. Sylvester was a 42 lb Maine Coon that thought he was a lap cat who had a habit of kicking my grandmother Rose (“Bam Bam”) who only weighed twice as much as the cat at most out of her preferred chair. As soon as that happened, my chair in the living room was then forfeit. But he always knew when Dad had a less-than-stellar day at the Academy of Health Sciences and would park his heiney squarely in Dad’s chair. And the growling and hissing and the bristling fur (that doubled his already impressive size that terrorised the neighbourhood dogs!) that would follow ensured he kept it.
But that was mild compared to the torment that Kismet would visit upon my father.
Kismet had a talent for knowing when an alert would be called by Dad’s units on Fort Bragg…when you get the call, you drop everything you’re doing and you’ve got thirty minutes to report to your assigned post in uniform and be ready to rock that Army stuff.
Invariably right before the orders to report came down from upon high, Kismet would feel moved to drop a deuce into Dad’s combat boots which were always right next to the bad so he could quickly get into them if the alert came at night. The cat had quite a talent as a bombardier… 🙂
Poor Dad would discover Kismet’s gift and whilst he would correctly identify what it was in a remarkably blunt four-letter fashion, unfortunately for him there was no time to waste swapping them out for boots sans kitty poo. I can only imagine how miserable the mandatory inspection upon arrival must have been!
And apparently that wasn’t the only thing Kismet did to the poor man. Siamese cats were used to guard the royal palace in Siam (now Thailand) by patrolling the walls and jumping on any intruders that they didn’t recognise, often raking their claws across the eyes to blind the evil-doer. Kismet decided to take a page out of that playbook when he ambushed my father with full claws to ensure he would get bucked off my enraged father who was demanding that my mother (pregnant with me at the time) get the cat off of him. Sadly, she wasn’t particularly helpful as she was too busy laughing so hard that she was truly worried about delivering me early. As you might imagine, that didn’t exactly improve Dad’s mood…or feelings toward the cat.
I’m not saying that was the root cause of the eventual divorce but I can assure you that those incidents were ones my father never forgot…or failed to remind me about them when the subject of cats would come up in conversation!
