Becoming a Centenarian

Summary

My father loved dogs, and so did I. Before the Labs, we had two collies, an English setter, a French bulldog, a Boston bull, and a raccoon named Pete, whom Dad brought back from a fishing trip in the Adirondacks. (A forest ranger there had found three starving raccoon cubs with no mother; he offered them for adoption to everyone he met, and Dad took one.) Pete stayed with us for two years, living with the collies in their outdoor kennel and going on bike rides with my older brother, Frederick, and me. We’d take turns letting him ride on our shoulders. Our mother never got used to Pete, and when he nipped one of her friends at an outdoor tea party, his welcome expired. Dad put him in the car, drove for two hours, and released him in the Catskills. Two days later, he was back. Dad then chauffeured him to the Adirondacks. This time, he didn’t return. When I was very young, our grandmother gave us two Persian cats. My mother disliked cats, and she wouldn’t let them in the house. They lived in the kennel with the collies and Pete.I once wrote a children’s book about an overly friendly mixed-breed dog named Ralph, and a haughty Siamese cat named Lavinia, who live in a house with two children and their parents. Ralph is determined to teach Lavinia how to laugh—cats, as you may know, have no sense of humor—and, in the end, he succeeds. The last scene has Ralph demolishing a dinner party by skidding around on the just-polished wood floor, upsetting tables and scattering drinks, and when it’s over and Ralph has been banished to the basement, Lavinia is discovered under a chair, lying on her back and shaking with silent laughter.Tomkins with his parents, in the summer of 1933.Photograph courtesy Dodie KazanjianFebruary 22ndYesterday’s entry reminded me of something that Trippie, my first-born child, said when she was three years old. (Her name is Anne; Trippie came from her love of car trips.) Our dog then, a black-and-brown dachshund named Waldi, had stopped eating, and we we...