I’m not sure I have just one.

First there was Snowball. Adopted him as an adult from a rescue, and apparently he’d been returned a few times. Food allergies, likely irritable bowel syndrome. Over the next 12 years I cleaned up a lot of cat vomit. Seriously - we have three cats now and it’s still far less than he produced. Eventually cancer got him.

But he was my best bud for those years. When my girlfriend (now wife) moved in, she knew we came as a package. One time she said, “I don’t think your cat likes me.” And I was like, “Are you serious? He loves you!” She just didn’t get cat language.

Late in Snowball’s life (we didn’t realize how ill he was at the time), we adopted a female tabby we named Minnie. She was so cuddly. She’d come up to me at night, and I would lift up the covers, and she’d curl up under the covers with me for a while. She was spicy, as one vet tech put it. But she was so fun too.

She had multiple medical issues that tended to interfere with each other, and she spent quite a bit of time in the animal hospital in her later years. We put her to sleep when she was 7 because she just wasn’t getting better, and even if she had survived that incident, there was no guarantee she wouldn’t be back in a few months with the same problems. I miss her so much. At least Snowball got a long life, he was at least 13 but could have been as much as 18.

These days two of the three are pretty cuddly with me. Stitch tends to curl up on my feet at night, though my wife has spotted him in my arms while we sleep too. Nibbler usually curls up on my lap and arm when I’m in the comfy chair in the living room. I’ll miss them both so much someday.

And lately Stitch has been showing signs of old age, he has a few medical issues of his own, and his black tuxedo fur is fading some, so I fear he’s older than we thought. (We’ve had him since 2016, and they thought he was about a year old then, but they really can’t tell - he could be 5 or 6 years older than that.) I’m not ready…