By Anna Daniels
For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street, …
Chaplinesque, Hart Crane
another abandoned kitten
photo credit Rich Kacmar
SDFP editors Annie Lane and Doug Porter are taking a well deserved, week long vacation. Editor (and husband) Rich Kacmar and I have assumed the control panel in their absence. If everything had gone as intended, our line up today would not be noticeably different from prior days, with the exception of the absence of Doug’s Starting Line column.
But the day has not gone as intended. In between posting and an attempt at writing was the morning feeding of a cat colony which includes outside cats and inside cats. When Orlando, one of the outside cats, did not show up for breakfast I carried his food tray out to the back yard where I found him intently looking at something by the garage. A tiny black kitten was tucked into the grass next to the garage. Its eyes were open but they were the tell-tale slate gray of an unweaned kitten. Orlando was not behaving aggressively toward the kitten but rather seemed to be guarding it.
Homeless kittens and abandoned cats are an all too common story in City Heights. Thirty years of experience with them has enabled us to quickly slip into cat rescue mode. Rich set up a large crate in our small kitchen; I hauled out an ancient mink stole and set up a mink lined small box to hide in, a small litter pan and then threw a sheet over the crate. The kitten didn’t put up a struggle when I pinched the back of its neck mother cat style to pick it up, held it to my heart and delivered it into the waiting crate.
The kitchen is filled with the sound of its piteous mewing and the occasional hisses of our older inside cats. Rich will be leaving shortly to pick up some kitten feeding bottles, goat milk and kitten food.
It is not even 9 am yet. I will settle down into writing something about one of many urgent issues of the day. But at this moment, I can still love the world.
through all sound of gaiety and quest
[I] Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.
Anna Daniels
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To Mrs. Reynolds’ Cat – John Keats
Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy’d? How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears – but pr’ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me – and upraise
Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists –
For all thy wheezy asthma – and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off – and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft, as when the lists
In youth thou enter’dest on glass bottled wall.
Thank you, Anna and Rich, for saving the wee kitten. S/he looks so tiny.
My cousin in San Antonio has a Cat Palace. I am now giving you guys the title of Cat Palace of the West. I don’t think they have ever given their cats a mink coat. One of the reasons I love you guys is because you love animales.
I have been sick in bed today so my cat, Tessa, has been getting a lot of petins. She always jumps up for petins when I lie down on the bed. She turns her right side towards me, looks over at me and nods her head. That’s my signal for doing her right ear. After a few seconds, she jumps up prances around to the left side, looks at me and nods. Then I do her left ear. She likes her chin done too. This sequence of alternate right and left ear petins continues till either she or I get tired of it. Then she lies down on the bed with one paw hanging off the edge, relaxed and contented.