archy

I blame the cat
This weekend, Clever Wife and I went out and adopted a small boy-cat. That's my excuse for not writing a long interesting post about mammoths, Nazi flying saucers, and minor creationists. It may not be much of an excuse, but it's all I've got.

We named the cat Marlow. We were looking for a theme. Our remaining older cat is a small black girl-cat named Mehitabel. We thought about Archy's friends--ruled out Warty Bliggins--and, after mentioning that Bill Shakespeare was a drinking buddy of Archy's in a previous life, decided that Chris Marlow must have been one too, since the poets and playwrights all hung out together in the same pubs. It's also a considerable improvement over his previous name: Grape Nuts (for a former boy, if you get my drift, anything with the word "nuts" in it is just cruel).

Actually, as a nom-de-animal-shelter, Grape Nuts isn't bad. The woman who provided the foster home and training for the group's kittens said she named them all after cereals. The group she brought in to show included Cap'n Crunch and Chex. I suppose, if you just need a temporary reference, grabbing a name out of the kitchen pantry makes as much sense as anything. Before we named Mehitabel, we spent a week going through German, Serbian, Latin, Gaelic, and Swahili dictionaries without any luck. It would have been so much easier if we had just opened a cabinet and named her Adams' No-Stir Crunchy Style or Lemon Fresh.

The kitty foster mother was a nice woman who said she started taking care of cats to provide her with company after her husband started to develop Alzheimer's. We thought that sounded very sweet, but on the way home we began to wonder if Mr. foster was still at home. Imagine what it must be like to have a failing memory and live with a constantly changing cast of small cats. "Honey, I though our cat was Siamese." "Where did this black cat come from? I thought our cat was yellow." "Someone must have left a door open; I just found two strange white cats on the couch." They say cats are good for most of the illnesses of age, but I imagine there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Even with cats.