In a previous post, I mentioned how the neighborhood I lived in while growing up shaped my understanding of animals and other people.  One of these neighbors was the elderly Polish man who fed pigeons.  He demonstrated kindness and respect for the pigeons and scolded me for frightening them with my childish play of chasing the birds.  Also living down the street was a rough-looking, younger man who I knew by the name of Boo.  It’s possible this was a nickname.  Boo was more of a temporary dweller on our street and wasn’t around long enough for me to ask more questions about the origin of his name.  While my mother never showed concern about time spent with the elderly pigeon man, there was a silent understanding that none of us kids should be hanging around with Boo. This made him even more interesting.

Boo lived in a house that was boarded up, almost directly across the street from the man who cared for the pigeons.  When I say ‘boarded up’ I mean exactly that. There were wood panels on the two main front windows and over the two tiny windows that led to the basement. The house had a back yard which is how I suspect Boo came and went from the house. I never actually saw him in the house or using the front door. He did sit on the front steps of that boarded up house which is how I knew him to be young and dark-haired.  My only knowledge of the inside of his house came from peering in the small mail slot of the front door.  The inside of the house had no furniture, but it did have cats.  The neighborhood cats lived in, under, and around Boo’s house.  My brother, my friend, and I knew this for certain as I’d try to call a wandering neighborhood cat over to me by crouching down and making that special almost whisper sound that goes along with saying, ‘here kitty kitty.’ Inevitably a cat would show some interest and then, before I could get close enough to pet it, it would run under the boarded up house.  There were probably no more than 5 cats in total living there. To me, a child desperate for contact with all animals, five cats was an incredibly large number.

One day, my friend, my brother, and I learned that one of the cats that lived around Boo’s house had a litter of kittens.  We’d overheard that Boo had already ‘gotten rid of’ the momma cat and now had to ‘deal with’ the kittens.  This was the perfect opportunity!  My friend, my brother, and I were beyond excited to take the cardboard box full of kittens from Boo.  I don’t remember the logistics of how the kittens passed from Boo to us.  In all likelihood, my friend who was a year older, wiser, more worldly, and more persuasive probably convinced Boo to give her the kittens.  What I do remember is my friend carrying that cardboard box of kittens through the alleyway into my back yard.  The kittens’ eyes weren’t opened yet.  They stumbled about the box, climbed on each other, and they meowed incessantly. They were the four cutest, tiniest, most helpless things we had ever seen.  My brother, my friend, and I each picked our favorite kitten, claimed it as our own, and then decided that the fourth one would, of course, have to be shared.  Our quickly-devised master plan was to raise the kittens in the box in our back yard while keeping them hidden from our mothers.  My mother had always made it perfectly clear that a)we could not afford a pet, b)she was allergic to cats and c)she did not like animals, especially cats. There was, therefore, no way we were bringing my mom into this kitten raising adventure.

Determined to care for the kittens as best we could, we put a bowl filled with milk in the box and since their eyes weren’t opened, gently placed each kitten directly in front of the bowl. The kittens walked right into the milk, covered themselves in it, and continued stumbling about and crying. We didn’t understand that the kittens were meowing so furiously because they were hungry.  None of us understood that a living creature could be so young that it didn’t know how to eat on its own.  With all of the frantic meowing, the situation in the box in the back yard did not fit into our visions of snuggling with purring, content kittens. Picking them up, cuddling them, warming them, singing to them—nothing stopped the crying. Even so, my brother, my friend, and I were stuck between wanting to help the kittens and knowing that if we told anyone else about them, they’d be sent back to Boo.  We were resolute in our plan to raise the kittens all while keeping them a secret from the world, especially my mother.

Gone from my memory are the details as to how the kittens went back to Boo. One thing is for certain, I did not say a word about them to anyone. It’s likely my mom heard all the crying coming from the yard when she came home. She probably discovered them on her own as my brother and I watched TV, pretending there was nothing to see, nothing unusual going on in that box in the yard.

Knowing the kittens went back to Boo made me angry and sad. I was angry because although I didn’t know what it meant to ‘get rid of’ an animal, there was nothing that sounded good about that for the momma cat and now her kittens would share the same fate. It felt so very wrong. I was sad because I wasn’t able to help them. They deserved a chance to live and be loved. I wanted to continue to love them and I couldn’t do that. Tenderness wasn’t welcomed or served at our house; crying for the kittens wasn’t an option.  Toughness, anger—those I had a lot more experience with.  So I toughened up when the kittens left and continued on as if they had never happened.  I didn’t know it at the time but way deep down, those kittens stayed with me.  Even now, in situations where animals have been neglected or abused, patience and kindness sometimes leave me–I’ve unleashed ugly words in situations where professionalism should have prevailed. I’ve stood in the middle of a vet clinic waiting room lecturing a middle-aged man about how signing a form for his dog to enter the local adoption facility really equated to euthanizing his dog.  The animals so rarely found new homes and it was my duty to euthanize the animals every friday to make room for the ones we knew would come in on the weekends.  My explosion happened right after I’d euthanized an entire box of kittens.  In each situation where my anger boiled over, my heart’s always been in the right place—on the side of the animals. I know now that the furious person ready for battle over an animal’s life is little me, fighting for those kittens, working hard for the lives they should have had.