dukakis arrives at muddy's 



we went, bonnie and i, to muddy's this morning, bonnie for work, me to draw for an hour before i walked down to s____. a little beyond half past, there was a flurry of excitement at the back door, which was standing open. a little cat had run in the back!

bonnie and i both beelined to the back, where a lady had picked him up. there was a beautiful black and gray kitten in her arms, as friendly as can be.

'we've been looking for a kitten!' said bonnie.

the lady was excited. 'you have? and she just runs in!'*

'cat,' i said, 'you're coming home with us.'

oliver let bonnie drive me to dr. cannon's. the doctor was happy to see us, and very happy to see that we'd taken a little cat off the street. he checked the little boy out, and gave him a distemper shot; we picked him up at 3.

i named him dukakis.

dukakis is five months old; i suppose he weighs about four pounds or less. he had no collar, and is not fixed (yet.) his claws are exceptionally worn down, in an irregular fashion, which tells me he's been living on his own for a while. he has no fleas or obvious parasites. he seems to have been a young cat who, at the age of a couple months, struck out on his own and has been on the streets just the past month or so. we are going to tool around brookside and the sub-plaza areas looking for signs, but i suspect we will find no one is looking for him.

naturally this is a huge surprise.

this is a huge surprise to everyone else as well. an hour and forty-five minutes ago, cracker greeted him with hisses, and trailed him everywhere, smelling everything he touched, but now he's chirruping in a friendly way and play-batting. chachi and hazel, after trying to stick it out in the open with a few feeble hisses, have retreated, each to their preferred lurking-places: hazel to the top of the kitchen cabinet, chachi under the bed. dukakis is swaggering around as if he owns the place. he seems to like cracker a lot--especially cracker's tail-and i think cracker will soon learn to like him better. the girls will take longer.

experimentally, i sat dukakis down in the litterbox, and he instantly used it like a professional. ( i think this may be the first time in the history of the english language that that sentence has been written.) but then, cracker used the box with ease as well, and i am pretty sure he was just four or five weeks old.

he's a beautiful marbled black and gray cat. he has a somewhat menacing-looking (to a human) face, and a stocky-little body.


we also picked up mikhail this afternoon, before we went back to the vet. it is amazing how little there is left of a cremated body, even one as chunky as my boy. i was a little afraid i had 'gotten over him,' since i wasn't crying every day, but i am happy, i think, to say that i cried again. he is still my baby. i am making a box for his ashes. i think it will look very nice when i am done with it.

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*we didn't know till we got him to the vet that he was a boy. we hadn't looked: we just assumed, for some reason, that he was a girl.

 



 

Posted: Tue - September 21, 2004 at 05:34 PM             |

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