Blogtrotter

Divine Mercy Sunday, a Nor'easter, a feral kitten's rescue

Call me tenderhearted. Defy what my wife says. She knows I am "Kennel Boy" by upbringing, no less attuned to flora and fauna than Tarzan. Lady Jane Goodall, the Crocodile Hunter, or Siegfried & Roy. As I made my tea, I looked out at what the dogs were barking at. In our neighbors' yard, black & white half-Siamese Gary The Cat was rolling about on his back in the higher grass. After a few seconds, perhaps sensing in animal alertness my eye upon him albeit from sixty feet away, he got up, acted nonchalant, and began licking himself with one leg 45 degrees towards the air.

On the IFSB Yahoo group that discusses Carthusian spirituality, members often chime in with their own prayer requests. Like a parish bulletin for the Web. What links the thousand or so of us who subscribe to thoughts about a thousand-year-old ascetic contemplative community of hermits may be understood only by a force outside of our own cerebral limits. (It's been suggested our little fellow discussed below be christened Bruno after the Order's founder.)

This morning, I read this post and pass it along in a spirit of guilty non-vegan habits. The Sunday LA Times yesterday in its debut Image section (can't call it Fashion anymore; I am even old enough to remember when Lifestyle replaced View replaced Women's World) had the kind of useless article I gravitate to-- the last such being on lesbians having their own car, with ads by Martina Navritalova, a Subaru Outback; male counterparts like Mazda Hatchbacks, Mini-Coopers, and Miata convertibles. The last of which in red driven in one of my work colleagues, flamboyant enough for our staid school that his mouse pad features him and partner, they being the now-diminishing stereotype of their own that once populated Laguna Beach-- about area codes and what they represent. Our 323 donut around the 213 that once dominated nearly all LA County and now is the donut hole around maybe five miles of downtown, is perfect for those neighbors of ours to the north. "Knit-cap, vegan hipster." Paul to the "t," and Inge too although not sure if she wears the knitted watch cap in lieu of kippah as much as her partner, who always seems to have it on-- at least as often as she has her black tracksuit with the stripes up the legs and perhaps those windbreaker-like painted buttons down the side.

The heretofore comparative safety of that yard-- today the land surveyors arrived; please save the intervening stretch from the bulldozers and the McMansion, whatever deities of Nature persist in our concrete-threatened, fragile barren rocky dusty chaparral canyonette-- may be exactly why Gary only helps concretize the stereotype more. Let's look at what his cousin three thousand miles away had to endure while Gary cavorts today in an admittedly overcast but surely more clement day.

I have a somewhat unusual prayer request. As folks living on the East Coast know, there has been a nor'easter vigorously making its way up the coast today, dumping rain (or snow) on everything and everyone. As the storm was settling in this morning, my wife and I found a feral
kitten in one of the window wells of our house. The kitten could not be even a week old-- its eyes are still closed, and it weighs maybe 4 or 5 ounces. We waited an hour or two, but saw no sign of its mother. Rather than leave it to almost certain death from exposure or predators, we brought it inside, and have been keeping it warm, feeding it with an eyedropper, burping it, helping it to pee, etc.

In the spirit of both Divine Mercy Sunday, and of Adam and Eve's stewardship over God's creation, please pray for this little, gentle, squeaky thing, and for its two adopted parents, who want to do their (little) part to shepherd God's marvelous creation.