Here Kitty, Kitty


I was going to get this other cat. Emphasis on going. I did not. It turned out to be a custody battle thing. I was a pawn. The cat did have problems. It had claw problems and leaving cat bombs problem and being elderly problems… but it was going to be consigned to the pound and I didn’t think a cat with all those strikes against it would be a cat that stayed at the pound. It would be a cat that was there for a very short time and not in the “found a home” way but in the “went home” way.

I felt bad for it. I saw its picture and fell in love with it. Big kitty, big fat, incontinent kitty. Pretty eyes though. I thought I could work with the problems but as it turned out the custodial cat father really didn’t want to let the cat go, he wanted to tease the non custodial cat mother. And in turn, me. Asshat.

I really can’t have another cat. Mr. Kitty is still getting over the advent of Dogger and I’m afraid that Kitty would freak out if faced with yet another new room mate.

So I said that there would be “No New Kitties Unless One Showed Up On My Front Porch”.

So.

Time marches on. Prospective new kitty stays with its family. My animals take turns hissing and barking at each other and eating my hair squishys and shredding my magazines, and we go on.

Then there was a kitty on my front porch. A little kitty. A tiny Tex. His doppelganger but with a black spot on his white chest. So tiny, but not a kitten. Just an under sized stray. Not feral, mind you. I can pick him up and he does all those cute kitty things. He purrs and does figure eights around my shins and makes biskets. Cutest kitty ever. But. Not. My. Kitty. He and Tex looked at each other through the screen door and sniffed each other. And tiny kitty went away. For a while.

Then, I took dog out for her final pee of the evening one night and I saw this smudge on one of my chairs. I took dog into the yard and she did her final pee and I took her back inside and said goodnight and went back out to investigate the smudge on my chair.

The kitty was on my chair. Spot was on my chair. Looking at me, he hopped out of the chair and followed me around the patio and let me pick him up and cuddle him. I think he’s a he. Spot doesn’t weigh as much as a paper napkin. So Tiny all by his tiny little self alone in the urban jungle. So much smaller then the other feral cats that roam the street. A prospective snack to whatever might get hungry.

So I fed him.

And I so don’t want to go back to being the cat lady of the neighborhood – been there done that all ready gave the tee shirt away. I do not need to be worrying about a feral cat. Even a very small feral cat – not even a very feral cat, a dumped pet, most likely. But even still. A stray is a stray is a stray. Up to no good, eats song birds, spreads fleas, most likely uninoculated, not fixed, with claws.

But so tiny!

I left him food one night and he didn’t even eat all of it, but he came around a teased Tex through the screen door, and then he went away again. Which either means some one else is his real feeder or he hits every house on the block with his poor tiny cat act and he didn’t like my kibble, or after having eaten all the neighborhood song birds and dumped over garbage cans in a twelve square mile area he just wasn’t all that hungery. I ended up with ants on my patio and that is not good. Up To No Good!

So Tiny. And I’ve named him. And there’s a hurricane coming… and now he’s gone away again.