First there was a dome, a geodesic dome, somewhere in the woods outside Houston. I had long been a fan of Buckminster Fuller, and Harold and I had planned to buy some land and build a dome. One day I told my coworkers at lunch that we were looking for land in order to build. The guy next to me said, “What kind of house are you going to build?” Now who asks you that?

When I told him, so pumped up with excitement that I pulled out brochures from dome house companies and dimensions and financials, he just shook his head. “Don’t do that,” he said. “My neighbor has one and he’s been trying to sell it for three years.”

That was all she wrote. We talked to the neighbor, and six months later, we moved in. It’s not the fanciest dome in the world, nor is it the largest, but it’s ours. My sister said, “It’s lke a hobbit house.” Yeah, maybe. But it’s our hobbit house, and we love it.

So we’d lived in Pasadena for 16 years. Now if you know Houston, you know of Pasadena. I say “know of” because most folks drive through Pasadena. It’s a path, not a destination unless you are one of the thousands of refinery workers who toil in the refineries every day and all through the night. I used to have a shirt with the slogan, “I’m from Pasadena, I don’t smell a thing.” The rest of Houston has less than flattering things to say about Pasadena. “The air is always greener” is the least of them.

But we moved, and at that time, we had three cats, KC, the original boy, who is a beautiful white short-hair with a laid-back attitude toward life; Smudge, a short-hair brown tabby whose gang name is “the architect” because he’s always inspecting things like the ceilings, the beams, the doors; and then there was Shadow, or “the doctor,” who wasa Johnny-come-lately to the household.

Shadow was a beloved indoor pet of the folks in the house on the corner of the next street. Then they moved and left him behind. It was a rental house, and the new folks just let Shadow stay there, out on the patio. But he came down to our house to eat and hang out at night. We walked over to his new owners and asked, “Is this your cat?”

“Yeah, guess so.”

“Does he have a name?”

“No.”

“He comes down to our house every day.”

shrug

Then the house caught fire, they moved, and Shadow found himself once more without a family, twice in about three months. So we scooped him up, took him to the vet, picked him up with the moving van and took him to the new house. Welcome dome, Shadow!

Thus were born the original three Dome Cats.