OWEN, THE STRAY CAT

Well, we have another cat.

This fact should not come as a great surprise to anyone who knows me. I have a reputation as a pet magnet. You know those high-pitched whistles that only dogs can hear? I sometimes think that I have a sign hanging around my neck that only animals can read. It says, “SOFT TOUCH.” My ability to Just Say No to a needy animal is seriously underdeveloped. That is why, in a nutshell, we are now the owners of two dogs, three cats, a cockatiel, and a parakeet, and have seen a succession of gerbils, lizards, and other creatures come and go over the years.

But like all good stories, this one has a twist. I am not responsible for this latest pet. The orange-striped kitten now sitting at the foot of my bed owes its existence to my husband, Bob.

As he would be the first to tell you, Bob is not a cat person. He’s a dog guy and is fond of Logan, our terrier, and Alex the retriever mix. He particularly likes to go on long walks by the creek with Alex, who plunges with insane abandon into the water and retrieves sticks until he is limp with exhaustion. Cats, by contrast, seem like relatively useless creatures to Bob. Left to his own devices, Bob would live in a cat-free zone.

And yet, a few weeks ago, I had this phone call . . .

To set the scene, you need to know that Bob works in center city Philadelphia. Traffic is heavy; people hurry by, especially at rush hour. The sidewalks are wide and bare, completely without hiding places. Offices and stores line the street. There is no place, logically, for a tiny kitten to come from.

But there was Bob on his cell phone, staring at a filthy ball of fur pressed close to the side of his building. “There’s this cat,” he told me. “It’s a goner if it stays here. Should I try to catch it and bring it home?”

“Nah, I don’t think so,” I said sarcastically. “Leave it on Market Street so it’ll get squished by a car.”

After eight years of marriage, he knew how to interpret that. “Yeah, yeah, OK. I’ll try,” he said. He returned his cell phone to his pocket, but he forgot to turn it off. And so for the next twelve minutes, I was able to listen in as Bob and, eventually, two homeless guys he persuaded to help him, tried to corral the kitten. “HERE LITTLE GUY! C’MON, HERE YA GO!” they kept saying. It was evident from the “Oofs!” and “Darn its!” that the panicked cat was not making the job easy. Curious passersby stopped to watch the drama, and each time I heard my macho husband explain, “This isn’t my idea. I don’t even LIKE cats. It’s my wife . . .” In the kitchen thirty miles away, I rolled my eyes.

Eventually the phone went dead, and I was left in the dark as to the outcome of the rescue mission. Just in case, I put food and water and a litter box in the bathroom, where I figured I could quiet a frightened animal.

Finally Bob’s car pulled in. He walked into the house carrying a paper bag, which he handed over to me as if it contained a live grenade. “I think it might be dead,” he cautioned me.

The bag did indeed seem to contain a small lifeless body. I took it into the bathroom, sat down, and opened it. An unmoving ball of fur lay there, but I could see the glint of two gray-green eyes. I scooped the kitten out and put it on the floor. It made one sad attempt to scramble away, then fell down, obviously exhausted beyond measure. I stroked its fur briefly and spoke gently to the tiny creature. Assuming it was half-dead with terror, I set it down near its food and water and left it alone in the quiet room for an hour.

When I returned to the bathroom, the kitten was not looking good. It had moved itself behind the toilet and was lying there limply, its eyes dull and half-closed, its breathing shallow. It had not touched its food.

I searched the kitchen for the most irresistible cat treat available. At the back of a cabinet, I found a forgotten container of sardines. I broke off a crumb of sardine, took the cat in my lap, gently opened its tiny jaws, and deposited the fish in its mouth. There was no response. The cat didn’t chew, didn’t swallow, didn’t shake its head in disgust, didn’t try to get away. It just lay there passively with the bit of food in its mouth.

“I don’t think it’s going to make it,” I told Bob, who was by then peering through the bathroom door. “It’s too weak to eat.”

Sadly, we looked at the dirty, doomed little creature before us. I returned to the kitchen, this time finding a dropper from a bottle of medicine I had gotten for one of my other cats. I cut off its tip to widen the opening, and I mashed the sardine up with a bit of water to make a sort of sardine soup. Taking the cat onto my lap once again, I gently squirted a tiny bit of the gruel-like mixture into its mouth.

Nothing. Then the little creature stirred. Its nose twitched, and it swallowed weakly. I waited a few minutes, then tried another squirt. Another swallow. A few more squirts, and the kitten began licking its chops after swallowing. Then licking the dropper. Then weakly biting the dropper with the unmistakable message, “More!!”

Afraid of overloading its starved little belly, I gave the kitten only a little food at a time during that first night. But with every passing hour it became more alert and more eager to greet the dropper. By morning it was eating the mashed sardines off my fingers; by noon it was standing at the bowl of sardine soup and was helping itself. After every feeding the kitten fell into a deep, deep sleep, but it was a healthful, healing sleep, not the near-coma of the previous night. I was covered with sardine juice and smelled like a cat food factory, but I couldn’t have been happier. The new pet was going to make it.

Three days later, I took our round-bellied kitten to the vet for its first checkup. As I sat in the waiting room, it purred loudly in my lap, just as it had purred throughout its first bath, its first ear-cleaning, and, today, its first drive to the vet. A three-year-old boy sitting with his mother nearby came over to inspect it.

“Nice kitty,” he said, staring into the kitten’s enormous gray-green eyes.

“It is a nice kitty, isn’t it?” I answered.

He nodded vigorously. “What’s its name?”

I hadn’t even thought about that. “It doesn’t have a name yet. We just got it. Do you have any ideas?”

He thought very hard, then said, “Owen.”

“Owen!” I said. “That’s an unusual . . . Wait a minute. Is YOUR name Owen?”

More vigorous nodding.

Three weeks into his life with us, Owen (who, the vet estimated, was about ten weeks old) is as funny and frisky as any kitten ever born. He lurks under the bed and leaps out to slap Logan the terrier, who regards him with enormous amusement. He scrambles over Alex the quiet retriever, who just looks with good will at him. White Cat and Felix, our two adult cats, treat him like the youngster he is, occasionally swatting his nose to remind him to mind his manners. And when there is a human lap to snuggle into, he does so, purring so loudly it’s hard to believe such a huge sound is coming from such a tiny body.

At night, as we are going to sleep, we have more than once been wakened by the sound of Owen clawing his way up the side of the bed. He’s still too little to make the leap. Falling back on old habits, Bob will say, “Your cat isn’t letting me sleep.”

“That isn’t my cat, macho man. I never would have known that cat EXISTED if it weren’t for you.”

“Well you’re the one who SAID I should bring it home . . .”

Owen listens to us argue. And he just purrs and purrs and purrs.