a very fragile animal

I’m not sure how old this kitten is, but it is curled up sleeping entirely in the palm of my left hand as I type with the right. It’s tiny. It was pretty dirty from that alley and needed some washing.

I think this one’s a boy, though it’s not easy to tell with kittens when they’re this small.

my new project

This kitten is tiny enough to fit in my shirt pocket.

You wake up and it’s a normal day, but then you hear a helpless creature crying in your alley, and you have a 15-year commitment on your hands.

The doorman over there verified that this kitten was dumped there today by some coldhearted people in a car. A “driveby.” No mother will return to save it.

There’s been progress already… That right eye seemed at first to be either missing or swollen shut. Also some purring and moderate playfulness already, though it’s been a very traumatic day for this kitten and there are still psychological traces of that.

a witticism that no one seems able to resist

No one seems able to refer to Berkeley without terming him, with mild sarcasm, “the Bishop.”

Fair enough. He was eventually a bishop. But that was in 1734, and Berkeley’s Treatise (the only work to which anyone ever refers) is from 1710– the work of a very young man, not of a stuffy old bishop.