We like to tell the stories about our family – see them all in the Time Travel section of our website, MyTravelMosaic.com.

Those episodes come from different eras and different countries, different ethnicity and cultures, but there are two things common for all the characters in those stories. First, they are all close relatives of ours, and, second, they are all humans.

For a change, we will talk here about our other family members – cats.

Like human relatives, they had their own personalities, charisma, ego, and unique relationships with us, not to mention that they were around us all the time, more than any of the human relatives.

Why cats?

First of all, there is nothing wrong with the dogs. The crucial difference, in our case, is very simple: most of the time you choose your dog, but it was our cats who chose us – almost mystically, coming along suddenly and unexpectedly, in fast succession, to stay with us all their lives.

We would like to share the stories about all of them – Usik, Terry, Foma, Rizhik and Nyusha – and the first story is about Usik, the cat who came with us to this country and made our adjustment a much happier experience. He lived with us for about two decades, moving from one place to the next one, and from one country to another.

The first time Usik showed up in our third floor apartment in Odessa when his eyes had just opened. Our close friends, Sanna & Sam, visited us on that day. When we opened the door for them, the first who ran in between their shoes, was that kitten – small, yet very determined. We were suspicious that it was our friends’ doing – they knew that our cat Terry had recently passed away from the terminal disease – but they looked genuinely surprised as well.

The most impressive in the kitten’s image were his mustaches that looked twice longer than his whole body. Our son, Fedor, who at that time was about three years old, pointed his finger at him and exclaimed – “Usik”, which means Mustache in Russian. That was how the cat got his name.

Usik and Fedor grew up together and the cat considered himself Fedor’s sibling – and behaved accordingly.

Once, for example, Usik jumped for the bird from our balcony, missed, landed hard, shaken but safe. Another time, in Odessa, during the brief earthquake, when everybody tried to run out of the building as fast as they could, he started his hide-and-seek game with us. Not his fault, but we couldn’t leave the building without him.

Usik looked like Egyptian Mau – with typical green eyes, “Mark of the Scarab Beetle” on his forehead, and dark stripe from his head to tail along its spine that separate Egyptian from the Europeans with the similar fur patterns. Egyptian Mau breed is rather rare, but in Odessa – a port city – everything is possible related to genes transfer, especially among cats.

Usik was officially acknowledged as our family member, thanks to the human bureaucracy. KLM Airline, based on the Soviet immunization certificate, issued a cabin ticket for him, where the family name was presided with the “Cat” as a salutation. Sad that the ticket did not survive.

That was the flight, which brought us to the US. As Tanya wrote in one of her essays, “…one morning we found ourselves standing in the middle of Manhattan with our suitcases, two kids and the cat…”, and, honestly, had no idea what to do next.

Life, as usual, is full of coincidences. The same Sanna & Sam, who witnessed Usik’s first appearance in our life, were the first who greeted us and Usik in the new land – or was it a coincidence?

Usik was happy neither with the flight nor with the destination, and expressed his protest for our decision by categorically rejecting American cats’ food – and not only cats’ food, by the way. Those, who, like us, came to the US from Odessa, would easily understand his nostalgia for “Privoz” – Odessa’s gigantic farmers’ market.

Fedor was also not happy with our move. He kept asking, “When are we going to go home?” At some point, Tanya declared, “Home is where our cat is”, and that answer was accepted without further discussions.

Usik understood that as well, and surely took his usual place under the table lamp on top of Fedor’s school notebooks.

Those were stressful times for all of us, and Usik made it easier – or we felt that it was his doing.

Scientists say that it may be true – cats stimulate us to release some chemicals, neurotransmitters, that could reduce our stress. The other say that living with cats could lower your blood pressure.  We believe that is true – we started using blood pressure medication only when Usik was not around anymore. Or, may be, we became older?