kidchamp dot net

02.05.10



{disturbing bob ross cat mashup courtesy of baby jo and george}

finding a cat hasn't been easy for us; for months my visits to petfinder inevitably ended in tears. when i was in the mood to look, our parameters made things nearly impossible: we wanted a kitten (my call*) who needed a home (also my call - i would never go to a breeder instead of adopting a shelter cat) who...was a siamese.** this is how we ended up looking at photos of kittens in berwick, pennsylvania. three blue lynx point siamese kittens there had materialized online around christmas and, presumably, been spoken for; two weeks later, on a random thursday morning, one of them appeared again. joe gave me the okay to put in an application - shelters these days ask for an application before they'll talk to you about a particular cat - and three hours later, i got a call from diana, the little guy's foster mom. "your vet knows you by name," she said with wonder. (well, sure: i was there at least once a week for months last year, and at least once a month for years before that. i also have a tendency to burst into tears in his office, so the staff is rather protective of me.) she'd called our vet and our references - shelters these days also ask for references - and said that our application was impeccable. we even beat out a vet tech who'd also applied for the kitten, a detail that, i admit, really pleases me: if you'll forgive the gaucherie of speaking highly of myself, i'm a damn fine cat-guardian.

two weeks after that, after cat-offers and -deposits and -photo-exchanging and -trip-planning, we set off to meet diana in philly (which was more convenient to her place near baltimore and our place in new york than berwick would have been). i called our hotel and made sure that they were cool with kitten-trafficking in their lobby,*** we spent the afternoon and evening kicking around our favorite places in town, and by sunday morning steve nash was upon us.

i'd forgotten how emphatic the little ones are. steve hasn't stopped moving since we let him out of his carrier at our place on sunday afternoon: there are chuck-tails to attack, books to topple, bulbs of garlic to gnaw (?). he doesn't really meow, but he has the deafening kitten-purr that rattles his whole body. he blows out his energy reserves so completely that he passes out on his stomach, arms straight out in front of him and out in back like a bunny, face-down on the sofa. we're exhausted. it's marvelous.

*though there are lots of wonderful older cats, i really wanted to raise one right from the beginning - and we lost jude so young. i couldn't handle falling for a cat his age with potential health problems i couldn't anticipate.

**joe was exposed to photos of manray at a vulnerable point ("can we adopt him?" "no, that's jamie's cat!"); he insisted on a siamese.

***"we're paying a hundred dollars to spend the night there," said joe, "and they just paid that guy twenty dollars to be on the phone with you for that long."