For several years more than several years ago, my wife and I lived in Brooklyn, NY. (This is as opposed to Brooklyn, IA, where I have been; the two could be more different, but it would be hard to do.) When we started living there together–she had been in the area for school, and I moved up later, once I was clear of comprehensive exams; I couldn’t stand to be away from her any longer–she had two cats: Misty (a big ol’ kitty) and Dude (a lithe snowshoe). While we were there together, we took in a third cat: the street-kitten Franklin Bedford Gates. (You can guess where he was found.)

For the most part, the three got along. Misty and Dude had been together for years–since long before my wife and I met, in fact. Frank, younger and smaller by far, would occasionally try to assert himself with the older cats, but they would remind him that they, in fact, had seniority, and he largely accepted it. They would snuggle together and play, although which games each would engage in with the others differed. (There might be other things to sat about that in time, but not quite at the moment.) And they benefitted from my wife’s indulgence of them and my uxoriousness.

At the time, my wife and I were making a pretty good living. I had full-time, continuing, union work; she had an assembly of part-time jobs, too. Both of us, being relatively young and unencumbered, lived within our means but pushed them; as should not be a surprise, we ordered a lot of food delivery. Because we were where we were and had the tastes we did, we ordered sushi pretty often. And because we were more bougie than we knew what to do with, when we ordered sushi for ourselves, we’d order a little for the kitties, too.

Misty and Dude both took to the sushi, of course. Being cats, they would be expected to do as much. Frank, however, differed from his adoptive brothers. (Yes, brothers. Misty was a neutered male. He was named by a young child who had not yet grasped the notion that not all cats are girls.) He’d eat the fish, yes, but what he really liked was edamame–the steamed-and-salted soybeans often served as an appetizer at sushi joints in our part of the world. But that was not something we knew when we got him; the woman who took in his mother had found him in a warehouse or somesuch thing, after all, not gotten him from any highfalutin’ family or even an overcrowded shelter.

No, we realized Frank’s love of edamame when one of us had dropped a pod of it onto the apartment floor. Frank leapt upon it, seizing it in his tiny mouth with its needly teeth and retreating to the side of the couch, hunkering down over it and under the lower ledge of the cat-tree we still have. As he started to pick at the pod-shell, trying to get to the beans inside, Misty–at that time close to four times Frank’s weight–padded over to check out what was going on. Frank looked at the older cat, pinned his ears back, and growled; I thought for a moment that a dog had gotten into the apartment, so low and fierce was the noise coming out of a kitten not much larger than my splayed hand.

Misty…reconsidered his investigation at that point.

Years have passed since, of course. Misty and Dude have both crossed the rainbow bridge. My wife and I are long gone from Brooklyn (either New York or Iowa; take your pick). We don’t order out nearly so much, we took in a dog, the mutt Cherry, and we adopted another cat, a black tortoiseshell named Stormy. Frank still stalks around the house, though, clearly himself the pet with seniority, and he still loves his edamame.

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