New Kitten

Curiosity

may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems
to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die--
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.

Only the curious have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

- Alastair Reid

Although the above poem is not the most merry of poems about cats that I could have chosen - it is one of my favorites.

Yesterday, we got a kitten. Two months old and a scrawny, big-eared mousey looking thing. Currently she's stretched out on my sister's sleeping bag, trying to cool off. Every once in a while she'll look over at me as I sit at my desk, and meow. Well...attempt to - because no sound comes out. We think she used her voice too much meowing at the pound. She seems very surprised at all the noises of the world, maybe because she has clean ears for the first time in a while.

There's something about cats that captivates you - the way they sleep, walk and look at things. Especially kittens. Yesterday, as I held her in the pound, I noticed how skinny and tiny she was. How big and ungainly my fingers seemed against her delicate ribs - how easily they could crush her. It terrified me - that fraility that while I was holding her, that I was responsible for. How she had no protection from the Big People.

I've had that realization of power before when my brother and sister were born. My sister was a big baby, full of life and laughter. She would talk constantly and sleep. She was like a doll, small and helpless but no one doubted her presence. Her single-dimple smile conquered everyone. My brother on the other hand, was small, slightly yellow with jaundice and slgihtly scraggly/gangly. It didn't seem like he knew what to do with his limbs - these attachments. Now my brother and my sister are feisty and loud things - 9 and 11 respectively. My sister has a quiet self-assurance, when she wants it, that goes well with her one dimple and birman cat-shaped face. She knows exactly where she is in the world. My brother, well, is himself. He's figured out the whole business of how to use his body and his mind, in fact he never stops. Both of them are top tennis players - my brother acts like Roddick - constantly adjusting his shirt, his trousers, his shirt again. My sister moves more like Sharapova - all girl but determined to get her point.

As I begin to enter into the 'real world' or the fake world of 'real people who have real jobs and steady schedules' (for the most part at any rate) I seem to be figuring out my place in life - or at least who I am without the rules of books, classes and homework. I know that I've bought myself at least 3 years worth of time but one look at that spreadsheet labeled finances on my desktop tells me that reality is going to hit way faster than I want or expect it to.