- Rusty Mack, a male dog of some type; Mother named him that for his rust-colored spots. Is it an irony that he was killed by a Mack truck?
- Mustard, a little black puppy, I don't remember the gender, so named because it shat yellow.
- Whistlepig, Mustard's sibling, so named for the whistling-grunting noise it made. Both died mysteriously.
- Coffin, a female black Labrador; she was originally named Black Magic, but Mother decided that was Satanic, so she renamed her Black Coffee... I don't know how that morphed into Coffin, but I suspect drugs were involved. She died of malathion poisoning during the great fruit-fly epidemic of '81, she got outside when they were crop-dusting the city.
- Chips, a female sheltie; my sister named her after the TV show (she was in love with Erik Estrada). She was hit by a truck, if I remember correctly. That happened during the time I was not in contact with my mother.
- Alexander, a male mutt puppy, one of Chips' enormous first litter. He died of food poisoning when Mother fed the dogs some leftover eggs from a brunch buffet we'd attended.
- Calico, a female tortoiseshell cat; she wasn't really mine, but I remember her because she infected me with tuberculosis and I had to have a lymph node removed, for which I still carry a rather ugly scar on my chin. She was put down after she was thrown out of a second-floor window (my half-sister was testing the theory that cats always land on their feet) and broke two of her legs.
- Alexander II, a little black kitten who died after about two weeks.
- Moe, a parakeet of indeterminate gender; my grandfather named him. He died of starvation after Grandmother went on vacation... I fed him while she was gone, but when she came back I assumed she'd resume feeding him, while she assumed I'd continue feeding him, and so...
- Alexander III, a finch from Woolworth's. He also died of starvation, I simply forgot about him (alcohol in large amounts were involved). I stopped naming animals Alexander.
- Maggie, a female lhasa apso; Grandmother named her after her own alter-ego...Grandmother's real name is Maggie Dean, but she thought that was too countrified when she moved to the Big City, so she goes by Dean; and it was her little joke when she did something stupid that "Maggie did it." And so she named the dog that, correctly assuming that it would be blamed for things. She had to be put down when she broke her back in a fall from a second-floor balcony.
- Claudius, a red-eared slider (aquatic turtle), I think he's male but I don't really know. He came with a companion, named Agrippa, but it died after a month. The names occurred to me out of nowhere. Something terrible will probably happen to him, too. I'm hoping he lives to a ripe old age, but the fact remains that none of the above died of natural causes. One might think I'm cursed.
) - Female Cat... I think
