MISS KITTY

MISS KITTY

When we moved back to Tallahassee in 1972, Miss Kitty found us living in the Groslight’s wonderful house on South Ride. Just after she loaded up her little coal black body on free cat food and diluted milk, which she had requested in the loudest M-E-O-W ever produced by a domestic feline, we noticed her belly seemed a bit swollen. But it didn’t recede after the feast was digested. So she and her developing brood of kittens lived outside until delivery day, whereupon she once again serenaded us with the infamous M-E-O-O-W until we let her inside. There, right in the middle of the bright white kitchen, she herself mid-wifed the birth of 6 perfect little black kitties. It was the first time I had ever witnessed a birth of anything, and I was awestruck. I think that was also the beginning of my consideration of the birthing of a child myself.

The most impressive part of Miss Kitty’s delivery was after she had given birth to the first black kitten. She had cleaned him up with her tongue when suddenly the second little sac of kitten slid out. She got busy licking the membranes from around his little body. Then along came number three, but instead of sliding all the way out like a watermelon seed spit out between your lips, this little fellow got hung up halfway through the exit. Meanwhile the firstborn had found the upright position and had edged, tipsily, over to Mom’s nipple to nurse. So there she was, one kitten hung up in mid-delivery, one kitten being licked all over, and one kitten nursing. And how did Miss Kitty handle this? She purred. So this is Motherhood.

Miss Kitty went on to have 3 more kittens, all right there in the middle of the kitchen floor, with me sitting on the floor by her side, “helping.” We got her a cardboard box with some towels and for the first few days, they all lived in there, in the kitchen, in a heap of soft shiny black bodies. Then she began to move them to other spots around the house that were apparently better than the box in the kitchen. One spot was behind the heavy curtains covering the sliding glass doors leading to the balcony off our bedroom. I was frantic when I discovered them all missing from the kitchen box and searched the whole house a dozen times before finding them. Later on, we would see Miss Kitty moving them to other spots, carrying them in her mouth, grabbing them just behind their heads. Occasionally she’d deposit them in the laundry basket, and then we’d see her moving them AND Larry’s black socks, one by one, to another location.

When the kittens were about 6 weeks old, I got dressed in pseudo-hippy clothes--bell-bottom jeans and a yellow peasant blouse-- put my long brown hair into two ponytails, one on each side of my head, put the six kittens in a big cardboard
box, wrote a big sign in magic marker that said “DON’T BE SUPERSTITIOUS, TAKE A BLACK KITTEN HOME WITH YOU” and set up camp next to the entrance of the fanciest grocery store in Tallahassee.

By the end of the day, I had categorized all humans into one of the following slots:
1. Don’t even make eye contact with the girl hawking kittens.
2. Look and say “Aren’t they precious! But my dog would kill it if I took one home.”
3. Look and say “Aren’t they cute! But my husband/wife would kill me if I brought one home.”
4. Look and start picking out which one to take.

I got two takers. One was a girl, a young woman really, who drifted up near the end of the day, deep in conversation with her friend, who glanced in the box and said, “OK, I’ll take one, if you’ll wait until I’m finished grocery shopping.” “Sure”, I said.

TWO HOURS LATER (what was she DOING in there?), when I had finally concluded that she’d left by the back service door so she wouldn’t have to tell me she’d changed her mind, she drifted back out, reached in the box, grabbed the first kitten she touched and strolled away with her friend. “Far out”, I heard her say.

The second kitten adopter was a guy. He had been waiting at the city bus stop in front of the store for about 30 minutes. When he saw the bus pull into the parking lot, he broke from the line, raced over to my box, and said, “I need a male. Which one’s a male?” I started picking each one up and feeling gently for tiny nubbins of testicles. “This one might be a male.” He grabbed the kitten from me, pressed it next to his chest inside his windbreaker jacket and leaped on the bus just as it was pulling away from the curb.

Which is why we had 6 black cats when we moved from the Groslight house to the trailer in the woods in Havana (Florida). But that’s another story.