Baby Friday's Safari Planet: The Twelve-Kitty Day

Anyone who knows me knows that I get pretty weird around animals. I thought I’d blog about it, for your amusement. Here is another one of my encounters with a random animal.

It started off like any other Saturday—sun high in the sky, birds singing, a fresh pot of coffee brewing. Teach and I strapped the leashes to Handsomedog and Girl One and we were off for a long walk through the neighborhood. (Skeledog is too fragile for long walks these days.) Little did I know what lay ahead. It would be quite a day for one such as me, one who possessed “kitty senses”.

For the uninitiated, “kitty senses” is what experts (read: Baby Friday) call the little intuitive sense that can spot a cat a 100 paces off. Some people like to call this wildly whipping one’s head back and forth in an attempt to scour every square inch of landscape for signs of kitties. Those people, friend, are haters. They are also possibly butthurt. But this particular day was not about haters; oh, no! It was about kitties.

I should have known what kind of miraculous day that awaited me when I met the first kitty. A little background: Teach and I take frequent walks in the neighborhood, and have assigned bizarre names for many of the neighborhood cats. This first kitty, however, was unknown to me. I quickly passed Girl One’s leash off to Teach and made my way over to the kitty. He was long and lean, clearly an adolescent, and was black with two white dots above his mouth. He wasn’t hesitant at all as I made my way to him, and within moments he was giving up all the pets he had. “So, what was his name?” Teach inquired. “Well, he was obviously a teenaged kitty…and he had that lovely dotstache…” We finally settled on Dotstache P’zone. It suited him well. We had not left Dotstache long when we happened upon several kitties we knew that live all in a row: Catty Arbuckle, the portly gentlemen who enjoys pets from strangers; Rock of Love, who is a little bit of a slut and does a mean impression of an inanimate object; Rufus, Jr.—on his roof, naturally; and Smudge, a skinny grey kitty with the heart of a lover.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that all of the kitties we encounter on these walks are outgoing. Heavens, no. There’s Realfield, the giant orange tabby who gazes disapprovingly from his porch. The Dread Pirate Oreo is likewise reticent, preferring to contemplate the riddle of his black and white fur, arranged like Wesley’s mask in The Princess Bride, the black ending just below his eyes. A sometime companion of Dread Pirate Oreo was out that day as well, and, like DPO, Gingersnaps was just as standoffish. Likewise, Bootsiebib (the cat with white boots and a bib, duh) preferred to stay on the hood of his owner's Buick.

After being rebuffed several times, I was starting to feel disheartened. I could hardly take issue with an eight-kitty day. How could I complain? Yet something was lacking. Who should I stumble upon at just that moment but a brand new kitty? This one was still pretty much a kitten…some might call him a “classic kitten”. He rolled around, batted at me, and invited me to pet his tummy, which I did posthaste. His name had to be as suitable as his playful demeanor, which is why I settled on “Ding Dong (Classic Kitten)”, or Ding Dong for short. Feeling revived, we turned the corner for home, when who should I spot but my old pal Smacky, so named for smacking me with his paw one time when I was petting him. When I saw Kitty Calvin Coolidge as we returned to our house it was just icing on a very large slice of kitty cake.

There you have it—the mythical, never duplicated since twelve-kitty (dodecakitty) day. The boundless joy I felt sustained me like reconstructive surgery or squirting whipped cream directly in one’s mouth. I was reborn. And, lest you judge me, think of this: yes, I did just write approximately 650 words about cats. But you just read them.

This has been a brief insight into the madness that is Baby Friday’s animal obsession. Tune in next time for the mystery of the Picnic Table Dogs!