Fiona has been with us a week now, and it’s only today when I was able to articulate why I adopted her a week ago today, Saturday.

She was abandoned in her carrier that Friday in the airport terminal at San Luis Obispo, this big steel-and-glass place where the people are always in a hurry. So was the man who left her inside. The backstory was that Fiona belonged to his longtime significant other. She died. He drinks, so he’s on his way to dying. That Saturday, he was on his way out of town. He called a relative of the woman he’d lived with to tell her couldn’t take care of the cat anymore and told her, too, where he would leave her.

Then he flew away.

Fiona’s experience is mirrored in my family’s history.

The little girl in the photo below is my mother. We think, but are not sure, that the snappily-dressed fellow with his hands on the chair is her father, Edmund Keefe, the son of County Wicklow Famine immigrants. We think he was handsome and charming. We know that he was a drunk. He also had a tendency during benders to “borrow” cars, in Taft, California, where I would be born in 1952, that didn’t belong to him. The articles are from April 1925.

Then, sometime in 1925, he disappeared, never to be heard from again. This is my grandmother and my mom at about that time. My niece, Emily, found this 1925 clipping from the Oakland Tribune. (His first name varies in the old papers: “Edmund” or “Edward”).

My mother never knew what happened to him, but the melancholy he left behind stalked her for her entire life. She died at 48. What she left behind—-I can’t quite find the right word—was imperfect but loving and brilliant momsmanship. (Below: as a third grader; with my big brother Bruce, with my big sister Roberta.)

So adopting this abandoned cat was natural to me. She needed a place where she would be safe, where she would never go hungry, and where she would always feel loved. She needs what was taken away from my mother, the very woman who taught me how to give gifts like these.