Bad news this week: The last of my childhood kitties, Dusty, went to the big scratching post in the sky. My parents held funeral services in their ever-growing backyard kitty graveyard.

We’d been expecting this for a few months. Dusty was a 16-year-old frail, little old lady kitty. Her kidneys had been failing for a while. She’d recently gone on a wild peeing spree, which the vet said was her way of pointing out that something wasn’t right.

Still.

We adopted Dusty in the turbulent winter of 1988. It was the eve of The New Kids on the Block’s rise to power. I was in the throes of eighth-grade gym-class trauma. My bangs were visible from space.

My grandparents, who lived in the country, found two tiny kittens abandoned behind their house. My grandma decided to keep the one with the long, fabulous white fur, naming it Fluffy until she came up with The Most Fabulous Cat Name to End All Fabulous Cat Names.

Sixteen years later, the cat still goes by Fluffy.

The other, less glamorous kitty was up for grabs. This one was not quite brown but not quite orange. More of a dusty orange, you could say.

Somehow, my sister and I convinced my parents to let us bring her home. I’m still not sure how we did this. We already had one cat – the ever-cranky 6-year-old Char – and my dad had recently starting going around in a t-shirt that read “CATS SUCK” as a subtle way to express his distain.

I know I should have objected to “CATS SUCK”, but it served a purpose. For years, that t-shirt was a helpful way to determine the dress code for social occasions. If my mom allowed my dad to wear “CATS SUCK”, nobody had to dress up. If “CATS SUCK” was forbidden, we all knew the event was black-tie.

I haven’t seen the “CATS SUCK” shirt in a while, and sometimes I wonder if my mom had a secret bonfire. Fortunately, my dad has a brand new, non-cat-related shirt that we use as a dress-code barometer. I won’t go into all of the details, but the humor on this one is a little more complex and involves manure.

But I digress.

The first night Dusty was with us, my sister and I started a tradition we’d keep up for years: fighting bitterly over whose room Dusty got to sleep in. Because we couldn’t come to an agreement, we both ended up sleeping on my sister’s floor with Dusty in a doll bed between us. Everyone enjoyed the arrangement, except Dusty, who escaped from the doll bed and peed on the floor in protest.

For the next few weeks, Dusty devised creative ways to get into things. She was so tiny she could fit anywhere, and she particularly enjoyed clomping around Godzilla-like through my dollhouse. When we left her home alone with my dad one day and she fell into a heating vent, he sentenced her to solitary confinement in the upstairs bathroom until she got bigger.

Every day, I’d walk home from the bus stop and rescue Dusty from the bathroom. I’d have a muffin, she’d have some cat chow, and we’d watch The Brady Bunch together. Dusty was also a big fan of Gilligan’s Island. My sister and I determined – and this made complete sense when we were 10 and 13 – that Dusty had a big crush on the Professor.

Dusty’s addiction to bad TV made her one of us, and she developed her own kitty personality. We called her “Tan Flash” because of the way she’d streak through the house. When she wanted inside, she’d hang on the window screen like a suction-cup Garfield. She’d wear party hats and baseball hats and graduation hats and little bows. She’d sit on us when we were sick.

Over the past few months, the Tan Flash got a lot less flashy, and my parents finally decided it was time for that Last Trip to the Vet. I feel sad, but I hear that Kitty Heaven has excellent TV reception, and Gilligan’s Island airs several times a day. So long, Tan Flash.