My rural Minnesota childhood with cats named Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach

In the summer of 1987, my parents moved us to a farmhouse south of Kiester, Minnesota. We lived a softball's throw from Iowa. Mom was pregnant with my brother; Dad traveled as director with the high school's marching band; and I had ten cats, all named after classical composers.

Childhood memories from this depth are fleeting. I remember being handed a circus peanut candy when I first sat on the regular toilet; I recall the lights on the car at night when my brother was brought home; and I remember the ten cats, swirling around me while I pumped my legs on a swingset in our backyard facing the wall of growing corn.

My parents loved classical music. When I was seven, Mom drove my brother and me two hours north to see Bobby McFerrin conduct the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in a performance of Handel's Water Music. I sat with a big red-white-and-blue bomb pop melting over my hand as Mom clicked her tongue and wiped off the mess. We listened to the bright strains of music and watched the crowd — fields of people — all on the riverbank listening to Handel. This was the city, I thought.

Once my cousins asked me if I watched Saturday Night Live, and I lied and said I did watch television on Saturday nights, and I thought it was live. While other families caught up on pop culture, Mom and Dad played us classical music. At night, my brother and I in my Dad's t-shirts would run around the house barefoot to Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain.

Before I ever borrowed my brother's Weezer CD, before I ever downloaded Ben Folds Five in college, we had a tape cassette of the Chieftains that we played quite literally to shreds. Whenever I hear Elvis Costello singing the opening to "St. Stephen's Day Murders," I think of me and my brother, bundled in parkas, eating microwavable ham and cheese sandwiches on the way to Grandma's in South Dakota. Among the cats, Schubert, a yellow tabby, was my favorite. Beethoven was old, fat, three-legged, and scary. He moved achingly around the swingset's poles, blind in one eye. Then there was gray-and-blue Bach, the pink-nosed Mozart, and maybe Haydn, hiding under the shed's doorway. The cats lived outside and ate field mice. Their fur was matted and rough; their teeth sharp. Apparently the feral cats came with the rental.

I don't recall a formal naming ceremony. I can't imagine my parents named the cats that way for educational purposes — but as a three-year-old, I didn't need to be told who Beethoven was, or who Schubert, Haydn, or Bach were. On car rides, my parents played tape cassettes of Mr. Beethoven Lives Upstairs and a goofy radio drama about Bach's children. I already had literacy with classical music. These cats were old friends. Years later I would discover that my favorite music supposedly carried pretension. An older kid at the park had a copy of some album with a naked baby swimming after a dollar. In college, everyone else's parents supposedly raised them on Springsteen. My first CD was Boyz II Men — which, incidentally, I loved — but I never understood these claims against my Bach tapes, my large-print Tchaikovsky sheet music for piano.

My parents were as tied to classical music as they were to newspapers and coffee in the morning. There was nothing "classical." This is what we listened to, our emotional vernacular. All music since has been measured against the memory of those cats rubbing against my legs, carrying the names of these distant, European men with wild hair and fiery eyes. I wonder whether the cats knew they carried these names. A cat is a cat — but these raggedy felines seemed regal, with arched backs, inhabiting the opportune backyard of a high school band director and his high-school-English-teacher wife.

My parents had come east from South Dakota and Nebraska during the 1980s, a dark time in rural America, when farms closed up all around us. Mom and Dad's artist friends had their farmhouse foreclosed by the bank. We also lived in a foreclosed farmhouse, a big, dark home for a child — but after the family before us had moved out, had said goodbye to the country life they'd only ever known, there I was, standing on my tip-toes on a chair, furtively glancing over the kitchen window, watching as this mysterious, seemingly ancient grey-furred Beethoven slowly marched across the grass toward the shed, a young Schubert and Mozart tripping along behind him, their tails high in the air.

Christopher Vondracek wrote a memoir half about himself and half about Lawrence Welk. He teaches in the English Department at Saint Mary's University in Winona.

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