from an email from my brother

My brother (the one in Toronto, not the one in Portland) sent an email that affirms Marcin’s earlier warning:

“Congratulations, that’s two cat rescues you’ve now been involved (Piddi and Tamanya). She’s very cute and the adolescent stage is even more fun than the kitten stage so I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, although be prepared for lots of climbing and knocking over of anything that can be knocked over in the course of climbing.”

Hmm…

We always had animals growing up, but I was never the primary responsible party; that was usually my parents, or my youngest brother when he asked for baby ducks for his 10th birthday or found three kittens in an old farm building on the property where we lived. (Incidentally, ducks make excellent pets, much to my surprise. But you need some open land, and in a city it would be out of the question.)

My brother in Toronto who wrote this message is an excellent pet caretaker, however, and excels at keeping them entertained at all times with often bizarre toys such as a radio-controlled pterodactyl flying above their heads.

He refers to “Piddi” above (pronounced “Petey”). I’d almost forgotten that story. I was riding with my brother from Chicago back to Iowa City in 1995, and we stopped for gas/snacks at the so-called DeKalb Oasis, outside DeKalb, Illinois. This little kitten was sitting on the side of the overpass all by himself. We let him in, and he rode on my lap all the way back, eating up my popcorn along the way, he was so hungry. (And it was absurdly salty popcorn, I might add.) But we had no room for him at my place in Iowa City, so we let my brother take him. He was a great cat, though I believe he eventually died from accidentally eating a leaf of some sort that is toxic to felines.

There’s another rescue I was involved in, however. While visiting my friend Michael in New Mexico a few years before that, I also found an abandoned kitten, and even named him: “Cito,” a good male kitten name I think. But since I was just visiting, I left that cat with Kate and Michael to keep at their rural New Mexico place.