Please allow me to introduce myself.  I am not Satan.  So, few of you will know me.  I am Crockett, though friends often call me Crockey.  Nobody knows the exact time or place of my birth.  I like that.  Sorcerers can’t write horoscopes on me.  It would be pure guesswork.  Everybody must judge me by what I do. 

By the time I was one, I had arrived in San Antonio if I was not already there from the start.  The hard truth about a cat-like me is that we tend not to know we don’t know where we are.  It never matters.  Instead, the thing is to have a home with cozy spots, good food, and gentle servants.             

Let me tell you how I came to have a home like that.  I was living in San Antonio, the very same city where my namesake never managed, despite all his bold talk, to win a fight.  Santa Anna’s gang got ahold of him, and that was that for that Crockett.  I did better.  When I was about one year old, bad luck put me in the center of a huge battle.  Few people have ever heard of this battle, the Battle of Martinez Creek.  The battle zone was a stretch of the creek that runs a wee west of Fredericksburg Road.  If you ever drove down Woodlawn Avenue past the Road, you’d take a bridge over the creek.  Almost as soon as you did, in those days, you’d see the San Antonio Zen Center on the south side.  The first house after it, I met my destiny. My buddy cat Walt took me to the house, assuring me the suckers, I mean people, living in it would serve me.  I had sustained grievous wounds in battle. An Army of Toms, crazed Mollies, snakes, low-life raccoons, and god-knows-what other evildoers had traveled down Martinez Creek from the north.  Walt, my current wives Bart and Fielding, and a gang of good cats that Walt, Bart, and Fielding had summoned waged war on the northern invaders.  Nobody was going to take their stretch of the creek. Bart and Fielding were ferocious warriors.  They made a stand at key runs and cut down the marauders as they tried to come ashore.  Let’s be honest. I got dragooned into service in this battle, but I’m no fighter.  It didn’t take long before the enemy overwhelmed me. I was wounded.  Somebody had mangled my left eye.  Some other fiends had broken a couple of my ribs.  Walt noticed my wounds.  He left off his killing work to help me.  That is when he took me to the house on Woodland.  “Stay here, comrade.  These clueless humans will be your corpsman.  Pretend to be terrified and in pain!”   As if I needed to pretend.   Of course, Walt said what he in the kitty dialect used in that area of Martinez Creek.  It was easy to understand.  It went something like “Meow meow, meow.  Meow meow meow . . .”  In Kitty speak, meow is meaning rich word, polysemous as big-worders might say.