The Birthday Girl

I promised baby pictures of little Zoe, and that's what I'm delivering.

A little background. In the summer of 1995, I moved into a rental house in K-ville with a roommate, Michelle. Not long after we moved in, a stray cat started coming by. She was a pretty little calico, and looked very young (she wasn't very large at all). She was also very scrawny. We took pity on the skinny little kitty, nicknamed her "Chloe," and in spite of our better judgment, we started feeding her. She didn't come by every day, just a few times a week, and she was very social and let us pet her.

One Thursday night in July, I was at a bar called the "Golden Spike." I remember it was a Thursday because the bar had stand-up comedy on Thursdays (and every other night, it was a country bar that I avoided like the plague). Michelle came bursting into the bar, plunked down at our table, and said "We have babies!!!!"

Chloe, the skinny little kitty, apparently had been pregnant that whole time. And she trusted us. So she chose one of our basement window wells to have her litter of kittens.

There were three little kittens: one nearly all black, one tuxedo, and one grey tabby. We helped Chloe take care of her babies as much as possible. We brought her food and water, provided her with a little towel to lie on, covering her window well with an umbrella on really rainy and sunny days, and chasing stray dogs out of the yard.

A few days later, her little kitties opened their eyes. I'm convinced that Zoe impressed on me as soon as she could see.

Chloe moved her three little kittens around quite a bit that summer. Once a dog found them, she'd move her litter to another window well, or to another house altogether. They lived under the house next to ours for a while, spent some time in a window well two houses down, and would travel back and forth between our three houses for several weeks.

One morning, I got a scare. I was showing the kitties to a friend of mine, and there was a raccoon in there with them! As it turned out, the raccoon was dead. I have no idea how it died. I like to think that Chloe killed it while protecting her babies.

Anyway, Chloe didn't mind leaving some of the babysitting up to us. She'd let us pick up and play with the kittens, and shed' go off looking for food, knowing that her babies were safe with us.


It's pretty obvious which kitten was my favorite. The little grey tabby, who had been the runt of the litter when they were first born (the tuxedo kitten was the largest, by far. The little black one was the smallest once they got to be about a month old). Once the kitties got to be about seven weeks old, we distributed them through the neighborhood. Michelle had moved away, and I had a new roommate, Darren. I don't know if he liked cats, or even wanted a cat, but he got one. I got first dibs on the kittens, since I was their second mommy, and of course, I picked Zoe.

She didn't have a name for a few weeks. Darren and I had a dry-erase board in the dining room, and we spent a lot of time writing and erasing potential names. One of the names we didn't choose, "Madison" became the name of Jason and Peter's new kitten (not from Zoe's litter).

We actually came up with the name "Zoe" while watching the TV show "Cybill." (Cybill Shepard's character had a daughter named Zoe on the show). It was a cute name, and it sounded kind of like "Chloe," the name we'd given to her mother, the calico.

Little Zoe was an endless source of amusement for us (except when she went through her peeing-on-everything phase at about 5 months old). Zoe's original "Daddy" now lives in Arizona, but Cory's taken over and dotes on her as though she was his own. And she adores him, too.

Happy Birthday, Zoe!