A Cat’s Up

About the only thing my folks brought with them when we moved to California was their accents. We kids brought ours too. “Can we all borrow ay catsup bottle from you all,” Peggy Ann asked our new next door neighbor Aunt Marty who lived with Uncle Hugh and their four boys and a Persian Blue. They were not our real aunt or uncle but we had many real ones but we would never know them. Ray called Mom Patty, but her real name was Mary, and Aunt Marty and Uncle Hugh called Ray, John. Uncle Hugh and Aunt Marty and their four boys and Persian Blue cat that used to sit atop the wall and stare into our bedroom moved away. The new neighbor mom Pennye’s real name was Mary too. When we first got Out West I went to public school, put ahead a grade, even though I’d never went to kindergarten, because the LA kids were slower. I remember sitting in class another kid reading aloud and I waited for the teacher to come down on him because he was saying his ay’s wrong. He said a cat with a soft article a, short and not at all sleek. It came my turn to read and I gave ay cat a hard ay, as long and hard and wiry as a cat’s tail when it’s a bottlebrush, and was astonished to hear the teacher interrupt me and correct my pronunciation of ay. Gradually we older kids lost most of our hard a’s and other quirks but the foibles of pronunciation still fool my tongue, like pass the catsup, and I wonder how his little tale might be changed had the author of my second grade book said the cat instead of a cat.