Adrienne! He Did A Thing!

If you liked my blogs about Frieda, our German cat friend, then you are probably going to love the next month or so of my blog. If you tend to hate cute-animal stories, especially those told by the owner of the animal, and especially those that aren’t at all interesting for anyone not present at the Incident of Adorableness, then: I’m sorry, because we have adopted a kitty.

(Incidentally, I am shocked that “adorableness” is an actual word. I’m never sure whether to be pleased or disappointed when I make up something—either a word or a scenario or a “creative” solution to a problem—that I think is exceedingly clever or thoroughly ridiculous, only to find out that it’s just reality.)

The kitty in question comes from a shelter called Saint Meows, which is a pretty fabulous name in itself. Adrienne very quietly completed mountains of paperwork that I never would have thought would be necessary to take a cat off a shelter’s hands, but since I have never owned anything higher-concept than a bunny, I don’t really know about these things.

I also don’t know much about how one picks the cat one wants to take home. I mean, I didn’t know. Now I do: the process involves successive waves of sureness and doubt, now influenced by emotion, now by logic, now by guilt; swayed first toward the adorable, then the beautiful, then the needy.

It came down to two cats, which seems like a more impressive narrowing-down if you don’t know that the shelter had only brought three cats to the Petco that was hosting the adoption night. Christopher (Robin) was a very long orange cat with cute white paws, relatively comfortable in the midst of potential cat-adopters, store employees, cages of insane ferrets, and children testing out jingly and squeaky dog toys. Franklin, a smaller and younger stripey-grey cat, wasn’t as down with all the noise, but was very okay with us scratching his chin. Both cats, the shelter woman told us, were equally lovable, equally playful, and equally equipped to be happy as the only cat in a household.

Our decision process defied all logic. Franklin was really, really pretty, but a little less interactive. Christopher looked, however improbably, fairly reminiscent of Patrick Dempsey (it’s a chin thing, we think), but a couple of us had some prejudices toward orange cats. We held both cats, stood around attempting to list pros and cons of each cat, and thoroughly failed to come to any conclusions.

I was not very helpful in this process, if only because whenever one cat would do something—literally anything—I would become entranced by the cuteness of it and stop the current conversation by yelling, “Aaah! Adrienne! Look, he did a … a thing!” At the time, this seemed both very important and helpful, and urgent that I express this without stopping to first give a name to what the cat was doing. Usually, it was rolling over, or pawing at something.

Then I had to leave in order not to be even later than I already was to a play that was about to start two T-stops away, so Adrienne and Hannah had to make the final decision themselves. This was fine, because there was no way I was going to suddenly become helpful.

On my way to the T and later as I was running to Brattle Street, I called Adrienne and left her two very unhelpful messages with information like:

“Jeremy thinks we should get Franklin, because he wants us to have a cat that it would be fitting to call ‘Scampers,’ and Franklin is definitely a more scamperey cat than Christopher. But then again, we could call Christopher ‘Kitty McDreamy,’ which would totally annoy Jeremy… so… it’s a toss-up.”

And,

“Okay, my sister also thinks Franklin, but Jesse says get Christopher, because we will come to love him more even if he’s not as beautiful, and also because it will totally annoy Jeremy.”

When I got out of the play and turned my phone back on, I had the following text message:

“We have selected Dr. Burke. Although a really cute kid just asked if we just adopted Christopher…”

So now we have a cat, or rather, we will when the shelter woman drops him off on Saturday. We’ve spent, and will spend, the intervening time accruing cat toys and getting far too creative with cat names. The name issue is complicated and awesome enough to warrant its own blog entry, which will be forthcoming.