Randy Fitzgerald

When I got home from work yesterday, the floor of my closet was strewn with ties—stripes and paisleys and solids, some in a heap, others stretched out like colorful snakes taking in the heat of a warm floor.

       That was my first clue.  Then I noticed spools of thread all over the bedroom floor, rolled here and there, long strands of brown and green thread crisscrossing the rug. What was this?

A trail of cloth measuring tape wound around a corner, under a door and into another room, the room that usually houses our “One Good Rug.”  That rug was now rolled up in the corner, clearly trying to stay out of sight. And then—there they were: two tiny blacker-than-black kittens riotously chasing their tails and each other, tumbling over and over, squeaking and growling and doing what kittens do best—making grumpy old men smile at the end of a long, hard day.

       I could smile even more happily at these two kitties because they’re not ours. Daughter Sarah had innocently made a trip to the Charlottesville SPCA last week to “look at the kittens” and returned to her house with two of them.

       “Don’t you know better than to go look at kittens?” her mom asked her. “Nobody ever went to look at kittens without coming home with kittens.”

       Actually, after Sarah had already become smitten with one of them—the one with the fuzzy fur and more hair in his ears than Andy Rooney—an SPCA staff worker advised her she really needed to have two. “A kitten always needs another kitten to play with,” she was told.

       I don’t know if that’s really true, but Barb and I have always chosen cats in twos, and it’s worked out well. I don’t think we’ve ever had two males at once, though, so we’ll have to wait and see how that works out for Sarah. They’ve already been neutered, but will they fight each other when they’re grown? Will one have to be dominant? Will they leave their socks and underwear on the bedroom floor?

       The SPCA staffer also told Sarah that these two little guys are brothers, though one is sleek as a panther and needle thin, and the other is a fuzzy wuzzy fat boy. The thin one purrs and sleeps a lot, and the fat one frets and frolics. That’s the great thing about cats—people who’ve owned some know that no two are ever alike in personality or life philosophy.

       It’s been over a year since our big gray Muffin Cat died, since Barb and I wholeheartedly agreed then never to have another pet.  Our animals tend to live into their twenties or at least late teens, and that would mean we’d have to make it well into our eighties to outlive the next one.  And I know you’ve heard a lot of people say this, but we’re just not up to having another pet die on us—it’s too hard, too painful.

       But that’s not a thought for today, when cute little kittens are running amok all over the house.

Sarah brought them along to town this morning since she’s teaching three classes here today and didn’t want to leave them alone.  One of her classes is creative writing, so I guess it’s logical that she would look to literature to come up with names for these fellows. 

       She googled “cats of famous people” and soon learned that Mark Twain’s cat was “Beelzebub,” Lord Byron’s was “Beppo” (and that was many years before the Marx Brothers, too), and Poe’s was a clever “Catarina.” Hemingway was on the list about three dozen times—that man knew some cats—including one named “Mr. Featherpuss.” (John Lennon’s cat, by the way, was named “Elvis.”)

       Not finding a cat name she liked, Sarah decided to give them people names, working from the brother angle.  She looked up first names for the Brothers Grimm (Jakob and Wilhelm) and the James brothers (Henry and William) before thinking of the Brothers Karamazov.

Ah, black Russians would be perfect, she told her mom. So at least for now these tiny little urchins have the rather pompous names of Ivan and Dmitri, though I take comfort in the fact that the next time I see them, they’ll probably be named something else.

I do hope she manages to be a little more imaginative, though, than Churchill, Coolidge and Matthew Arnold, all of whom named their cats “Blackie.”