Well, the time for pumpkins and ghosts is here again. The Commerce City Recreation Center will be full of scary looking creatures this weekend and little witches and black cats in our neighborhood will tap on the door and cry "Trick or Treat."

From the time I was a little girl who collected cats, I've always been a cat lover. One Halloween a black cat followed my sister and I home when we went trick or treating (I might have given it one of my treats). That cat treated us with a batch of kittens. I was delighted, I wanted to keep them all but I was tricked. My mother and dad sent my sister and I off to go swimming and my Dad got rid of the kittens. I did some crying over that, but if I had all the tears I shed over cats getting run over or dying I could have filled that swimming pool myself.

My Linda loved cats so much that she could see a cat a mile off. If we were 100 miles from the nearest house she would say, "Oh, there's a cat," and before we could stop her she called "Here, kitty, kitty," and we had another feline member of our family.

But as much as I love cats I'll admit some cats are just nicer than others. When we lived in the country out by Wattenburg there was a creek that ran in the back of our home and we had a couple of cats. One of our cats was a real scrounge. This yellow Tomcat was a pest and he especially bothered my husband, Earl. Their personalities just clashed. Earl decided to get rid of him. The first I knew about this attempt was when he came in and told me "Well, don't let anyone ever tell you that cats can't swim."

"What?" I asked.

"I tried to get rid of that cat," he admitted. "I threw him in the creek."

"You threw that poor cat in the creek?" I was a bit shocked.

"Yes," he said. "But he sure could swim. I never saw anything move so fast."

Sonny James sang a song, "The Cat Came Back," and I guess old Tom lived by that creed. But although the cat came back, the swim didn't seem to change his personality, he was still an ornery old coot. I guess he figured since he had nine lives he wasn't very concerned over one of them.

But Earl decided to try again, he put old Tom behind the tail pipe of the car to gas him. I wanted no part of that dastardly deed, after all it wasn't me who couldn't get along with the cat. I went back inside the house. Husband gassed the cat, dug a hole and buried poor old Tom.

But the cat had his revenge because a couple of days later old Tom appeared at the door. He was dirty and looked a little the worse for the wear, but he didn't look as bad as the rest of us. I was shocked, Earl was white as a sheet. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.

"That cat dug himself out of that hole," he gasped.

Old Tom was hungry and in a few days he looked as good as new. He must have been on another life because the cat's personality improved a great deal. Old Tom was a good cat from that day forward. Guess he figured he shouldn't use up anymore of his lives. We didn't have anymore cat gassings around our house.

When Sonny James sang "We thought he was a goner, but the cat came back," I think he was singing about that yellow Tomcat.