The Cat And I

There's an orange kitten yowling underneath my bed. For something so tiny, she makes a lot of noise. Did you know kittens howl? Because this one does, howls and whimpers and makes her disapproval at being taken away from her mother quite vocal. Did you get any sleep last night? Because I certainly didn't. Not even when I woke up and begged her—on my knees—that tomorrow one of us would be pissed off and the other exhausted and did she really want to deal with the pissed offedness and the exhaustion at the same time? Couldn't she leave off the yowling till, say, eleven am, which is a reasonable hour to yowl, I would say. She looked at me balefully (cats are excellent with these baleful looks I realise) and said, opening her tiny mouth as far as it would go "YOU'RE THE REASON I'M HERE YOU WHORE OF SATAN." Right. So not a good beginning.

So, yeah, I got a cat. While 40,000 other people lined up to watch Roger Waters, I went armed with a pink plastic picnic basket and a bottle of wine to pick up the kitten. (And as gesture of gratitude, I should mention the cat is formerly her property, but I went with this
guy to pick her up. Much appreciated, btw.) Anyway. The Cat was not happy about being bundled into a picnic basket. She was caught, not without quite a fight I might add, as she scampered away and hid under beds and couches and everything and her mother appeared looking so sad and so accusing, that I nearly cried. Finally, the cat was caught, and we took her back home, where she hid under a cupboard, yowling every now and then and we finished the bottle of wine, that had been sent back with us. Good wine.

This morning, there were two favourable accomplishments. One, is that the litter box had been used after just one gentle reminder. Another was that she finally deigned to eat something, and when I went down on my stomach and yanked her out from underneath the cupboard she looked happy to see me and we spent the next hour getting acquainted, with her butting her head on my legs and entwining herself around me and general cat affection. Then she explored the house, letting out experimental yowls, waited for me to lift her onto the windowsill where she stayed for some time, and then the construction noises started and all my good work was undone because she rolled her eyes at me, thinking surely, I can't trust this woman for an instant and then took off to yowl under the cupboard. Now she's stopped. I think (hope) she's fallen asleep.

So, after much debating last night, her name finally came to me around 3.30 in the morning, I think, as I was stuffing a pillow over my head to block out her sounds. Her name is tc (note the lower case, this is a cummings type cat) tc for the cat and, duh, for turquoise cottage. I think it's a pretty cool name in a double-meaningy sort of way. tc could mean so many things—tangerine coloured, total chaos, tummy crawler, you get the picture. And it's a nice sort of name for a cat.

"So, the cat," I said to her this morning as she attacked my toes, "It's not such a bad world after all, now is it?"
"Aieou," said the cat, "aieou, aieou."

Hey, at least she knows her vowels.