My Communist Tabby

~ Veselin

I consider starting a new post series on my blog about my experience with the communist Bulgaria, between 1979 and 1989. The idea is inspired by a book I’m currently reading, but more about the book once I finish it.

The story today is about my first cat. She was a tabby with lots of white, not as much as the cat above but you get the idea. The year is 1987 or 1988.

My brother got her from a friend without permission, let her home, and she hid behind some furniture for hours. She was probably 4-5 months old at the time. Our parents weren’t too happy about it but played cool and let us have her. We were super happy, must’ve played with her for hours every day. She loved playing, loved chasing walnuts, and was overall a very energetic animal who seeked attention. My hands had some constant 10-20 scratches at any time as she was always sharp and ready for battles.

Our plays didn’t sit well with the neighbor from the floor below. Now that I have kids of my own, I can imagine the noise we made with the cat and all these walnuts and tennis balls. The neighbor’s response to the issue, however, was that he would yell at us, threaten us, and he tried to enter our place several times. One time, he kicked the door while my brother was on the other side, and opened a large wound on his forehead. My parents called the police. A very large officer showed up and interviewed us, then left. I still remember some very uncomfortable questions for my age, like exact words of the insults the neighbor was screaming. Also, the size of that officer was stunning for us. Obesity in communist Bulgaria was uncommon because people didn’t have all that much food. We were all thin.

There were no follow-ups, we reduced the number of rolling toys, and the neighbor banged on the door less often after that. My brother’s would healed. Cat kept finding walnuts for months after, I guess she had a secret stash in difficult to reach places.

She disappeared about a year later, apparently she got sick or poisoned during our summer break. Looking back, I suspect her diet might not have been very healthy as we didn’t have cat food. She would eat things like bread, milk, yogurt, and occasional canned fish. Wouldn’t be surprised if she suffered the health consequences for eating bread and not enough taurine. We were unaware of any of that at the time, Internet didn’t exist, and there were no vets for pets anywhere to be found either. Cat food as a concept didn’t exist either. Stores would sell essentials only – bread, milk, flower, sugar, and so on, and they would run out, so you’d have to wait on a queue or go at specific days or hours.

Having another cat after I became an adult showed me how much food a healthy cat needs and how large they can get. So poor thing, didn’t last long with us but at least, she was loved and played a lot.

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21 thoughts on “My Communist Tabby”

    1. I’m not familiar how this works but it should stop some of the scrapers from indexing your site and using it for training.

      Pros – you won’t train an engine that doesn’t normally give you attribution when using the knowledge it got from you.

      Cons – even if all of us did it, the impact on the engines would be minimal, and most engines just train on scraped content. They can also keep their humanness updated, using platforms like X, Facebook, Github, Amazon and so on, owned by the same people who own the engines.

      Sooner or later, the lawmakers will have to find a legal way to battle scraping without authorization or attribution, search overviews, and other diseases of the modern web.

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      3. Who is focused on it? I’ve noticed that the only thing that brings any attention to my blog is when I write personal things. I don’t know why. Blogging these days is very different than the previous time I was hooked to it. I get all my traffic by other blog owners reading my latest 2-3 posts. I used to get all of my traffic from google, on old posts. I feel like that’s completely gone since Google introduced the AI Overviews, which I dislike so much.

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      4. For the past week other two AI is focused on personal posts, other times it switches and can hit on many topics. The one thought I just had is, it may be time to delete all my personal photos or is it even worth it. There already out there floating around. Do you allow WP to share your content with WP AI partners, may be to personal but your tech savvy and I’m curious. 🙂

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      5. My suggestion would be to turn the feature off and leave everything else as is. It’s on for me – I personally prefer to get some mentions by ChatGPT. My main concern is about Google’s AI Overview, and I’m not aware of a way to impact that

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  7. When I visited Bulgaria in 1996, my friend and I stayed with a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer who was working in Sofia. He had a black and white male kitten named “Stiga Bey” or something like that. He said it meant “stop it” in Bulgaria. I spent a week sleeping on his floor, so as a thank you, I went out and bought him some Friskies cat food. It was being advertised everywhere in Sofia, like Lucky Strike cigarettes. He was grateful for the cat food. I’m sure it was very expensive on our Peace Corps allowance.

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    1. Ahahah, Stiga Be – what a great cat name.

      1996 was close to the end of the transition, when 6 years into the transition, the country was still ruled by the communist party. The moral and economical collapse was so big that my parents worked for under $10/mo each and we lived on bags flower and home made plum jam. That’s also worth a separate post 😀

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      1. Yeah… I seem to remember inflation was a very serious problem during that time. The guy we stayed with talked about how the Lev was worthless, or that its value fluctuated a lot.

        I remember we also went to Sozopol and a family invited us to stay with them for about $3. We had a lovely view of the Black Sea and an outdoor shower! But they warned us they didn’t have a stamp for the police. Fortunately, we got one that covered us for our whole stay in Bulgaria. The border guard was disappointed when we left. I think he hoped to fine us $100 each!

        I seem to remember the family we stayed with also had a cat. I got a picture of her eating from their outside table. I’m sure Sozopol is very different now.

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