It had been a long, dry summer. Literally. The middle of California, well, actually, all of California was in a period a drought. We still are. But, even worse, so was my life. I'd moved back to the city in which I'd raised my sons, retired, due to health at the time, from my teaching profession and felt like my soul was walking through the same desert as my checkbook.
It was June and I'd just entered my sixth month of unemployment. Yes, I was able to substitute teach, but it meant no summer income and it was scary not to have medical insurance for the first time in my life. So I began to mull about ways to get out of myself, my misery. Ways to mentally remove myself from the panic of my circumstances....a summer with no income. Rusty and I had been visiting local assisted living and skilled nursing facilities then we stopped, when our valley 100+ temps arrived. But we started going again. Just to give of ourselves. To think about someone else. To care. To feel. To laugh.
One day three high school girlfriends I'd managed to reconnect with met for lunch. One of them, Cyndi, desperately needed to find a forever home for a kitten her Aussie shepherd had caught and she was caring for. Now, I thought she was talking about the cat to which she'd recently changed to be her Facebook profile photo. A stunning dark blonde amber-ish cat/kitten. 'Cause you can't tell the size on a teeny photo. Cyndi knew I'd been talking about getting a kitten so she invited back to her Mom's to see this kitten. Thinking, "Wow, I would love to have a kitten with that beautiful coat, I said sure. We walk into her living room and the kitty comes bouncing through. I'm surprised Cyndi and Dot couldn't hear my heart thud to their floor because this kitten wasn't the one in the photo. No no no no. This munchkin's coat of fur was the drab gray kind of cat we used to call an alley cat when I was a kid. Not a thing special or beautiful about her looks to me. Gray, black stripes, a little white. Eh.
But I did want a kitten. So I said yes to help out the poor ugly thing. (The kitten, not Cyndi!) They delivered her to me a week or so later when it no longer had to be bottle fed. Poor thing didn't even have a mommy (me, people!) who loved her. Sigh. I was hoping she'd grow on me because, after all, what's cuter than a teeny kitten to cuddle and play with. Right? WRONG!
Good gracious God Almighty, was I a dumb blonde! After a few hours I realized I'd never had a teeny kitten, I so did not know what I was in for! I had no clue as to the behavior of a kitten other than if I had more than one they'd happily roll around on each other. Cuddles???? HAHAHAHAHA. People! Kittens don't cuddle! Who knew? Well, okay, not me. Now they might fall asleep on you after their private play session, but if you do more than breathe they wake up and it's game on! And that means they just run away into another room or area to the next piece of paper on the floor or other diversion and they are happy campers. Almost.
It seems that another factoid I did not know about kittens was that they can be biters and boy could she bite. Three times that summer she bit either my leg or once my big toe in the night and clamped down so hard I had to apply alcohol and band-aids after limping and dripping blood to the bathroom! So she had to sleep the rest of the summer in her carrier so I'd feel safe at night! Another skill I didn't know about was that, yeah, it's okay to call me stupid, but, no, be gentle... call me uninformed, I did. not. know. kittens. claw ! By the time I started subbing again in September my little first graders were asking, "How did you hurt your arms, teacher?" So I'd ham it up and regale them with stories about my little devil kitty. They loved it.
Hey...I wanted to love this kitty. But, pain is pain, and is not conducive to fond affection especially without the cuddles which were clearly a fantasy. But, hey, she was fun to watch and photograph so she was staying. I kept thinking, "Surely she'll grow out of this biting, clamping, clawing, digging by time she's a year old. Surely Shirley. Question was: Did I have enough band-aids to last eight more months of this?! (To be continued)
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