October 28, 2005

550pm
     Today I am going to bring a kitten into my household. I've been petless for nearly 7 years--my last cat died in February 1999, a few weeks before I began working at the Internet Shopping Network. Such a long time ago.
     Now I'm driving over to Michelle's place to pick up a kitten. I wonder which one I'll get.
720pm
     I picked Scratcher. Michelle sent me pix of the three kittens last week; today I sent the picture of Scratcher to the Walmart gang and told them that's my new cat.
     The kitten is now pacing around my apartment, exploring. He doesn't seem overly distressed. He mewed a little in the car on the ride home    
755pm
     So far the kitten seems to be making himself right at home. He's exploring around but keeps coming back to me at my typing desk and walks up my chest and rubs noses with me. He chased a moth around for a while. He ate a potato chip out of my potato chip bowl, so I moved him over to the cat dish with kitten chow on the kitchen floor and he ate for a while.
     I'm delighted with his demeanor so far. I was worried that he'd dive under the bed and stay there for a couple of days like Parsy back in 1969.
     Now the kitten is dozing off in the space under the printer where I keep the iBook and the little scanner. This is looking good. Michelle said this kitten was not affectionate, but maybe that was part of the situation of being one kitten in a household of three cats, three kittens, a pit bull, a three-year-old girl, and Mom and Dad among a massive household remodeling environment.
925pm
     It's been a very long time since I had a kitten. The summer of 1969, if I recall correctly. Rhonda and I were living in Lake Orion, Michigan, and we were about to drive across the continent to California, and we took two kittens from a litter at Kay Schumacher's house. Her black cat Spooky had the kittens but they were mostly feral. We brought the two kittens back to our place and they vanished into the underbrush for days. If you saw a kitten, it froze, and then if you made the smallest motion, the kitten scuttled under a bed or whatever other cover it could find.
     Then after a few days, I'd wake up in the middle of the night and the striped kitten would be standing on my chest staring at my eyes. I'd make the slightest gesture and the kitten would teleport away.
     But over the days, the kitten would slowly allow me to touch it before jumping away, until finally it was spending its nights with its cold wet nose stuck into my left armpit all the time.