How Georgie Found Me

Once upon a time...

It was just another July day when I went down to my uncle's car to see if he had a pack of cigarettes in his glove compartment (for him, not me). The busy main street just by our condominium complex was clogged with after-work traffic, which had gotten back to normal even only a few months after the pandemic had begun to rage in the United States.

After I checked—and failed—to find an extra pack of cigarettes, I closed and locked the car—only to hear a series of loud meows that seemed to bounce off the building. I looked up towards the balconies overlooking the front parking lot and frowned. Had someone left their cat outside on their balcony? The echoing meows continued, but still there was no trapped cat I could see. Shaking my head, I walked back towards the front door of the building.

A chance glance at a bush near the door had me do a double-take: crouched underneath the leaves was the discernible shape of a kitten, barely the size of my hands put together.

I almost couldn't believe the loud meows had come from such a tiny thing. I bent down, reaching out my hand for the kitten to sniff, but even the distance between us made the kitten back up and flash its teeth at me.

I was at a loss for what to do. Every time I tried to get close to the kitten, it would hiss and spit at me, obviously more feral than friendly. After calling my aunt to come downstairs, she brought with her a can of cat food and a box. But the kitten would not go near the food, despite its earlier cries of want.

Eventually, my aunt went upstairs again and returned with a pair of my uncle's oversized leather gloves for me to use to catch the kitten. A quick grab later, I had the unhappy kitten stuffed in a waiting carrier.

That night, the kitten continued to hiss at us whenever we came near the carrier. We eventually decided to put the kitten in my bathroom's bathtub. We opened the carrier for it to roam freely and left it water and food. Yet whenever we left the room it would begin to cry anew.

When the kitten finally did eat, grateful meows erupted from its tiny body even as it gulped down food. I imagined the kitten had not been able to eat so much food in quite a while, if ever at all.

As I took turns with my uncle to check on the kitten, I would play music off my phone to try and lull the kitten to sleep. But every time either of us tried to leave the room, the meows would continue. So went the first night of the kitten's arrival.

The next morning, we took the kitten to the vet to get it checked for fleas or any warning signs of illness. Among other questions, of course, was the big reveal about the kitten's gender. (The stories go that it's not the best idea to have two female cats in a household, so I was crossing my fingers that the kitten would be a laid-back male.)

"It's a boy!" the vet said, much to my relief.

My uncle inquired about any people looking to adopt a kitten. He emphasized how we already had two cats and another would probably be too much for our space-limited condo.

It broke my heart, the idea of giving him up, but the vet took a picture and said he would put up a flyer to see if anyone would be willing to adopt the kitten. The office would call us if anyone showed interest. We left the vet and decided to try and see how the next week would go—and if anyone would call about wanting to adopt the kitten.

A friend convinced me to call a local shelter to see if there was a better way to find a home for the kitten. One call later, I was sobbing: the volunteer on the other end of the line had told me that if I had called animal control in my area they would have taken the kitten and euthanized it because of an over-surplus of animals due to the pandemic. I was so grateful that we hadn't gone with our first instinct to try and get animal professionals involved right from the beginning.

Little by little, the kitten was already crawling its way into my heart.

Due to the fact that we already had two cats in the household, the vet told us to try and keep them as separate as possible (though of course that made sense, given that we had to do the same when our first two cats were meeting). My bathroom became the kitten's little alcove, and I would go in and sit with him. His favorite past-time became trying to catch goldfish across my iPad screen. (Who knew there were even YouTube videos to keep cats from getting bored?)

During the day, we kept the kitten in a mesh play pen (thanks, Amazon, for the speedy delivery!), and he slept in a cat carrier, positioned right by my head, at night. It took him a little while to find the litter box on his own, so I developed a routine where every few hours I would pick him up and take him to the litter box, just to get him accustomed to using it.

We also learned early on that he was quite the escape artist, even managing to get out of the carrier one night where my only alert was the hissing of one of our other cats as she found the kitten wandering in the condo by himself.

I also began playing him nature videos for those moments when he was restless in his carrier at night. He would listen and watch intently as birds, squirrels, and other animals darted across the screen, until he finally fell to sleep for the night.

One of our major concerns before deciding to keep the kitten was that we already had two senior cats, Bob and Kami, whom we imagined would not react well to another furry addition to the family. But after the initial meeting, the cats sniffed each other and decided maybe the new addition wasn't so bad. One nice day they even began to sit together and admire the trees outside our condo.

A week later, after we had decided to keep the kitten, we took him back to the vet for a more thorough check-up. An analysis of his stool sample showed that he did indeed have intestinal roundworms that needed to be treated. Other than that, he was healthy and ready to adapt to his new home.

It seemed like everything was going according to some unseen plan. The weirdest part was how I had talked about getting another cat during the initial days of the pandemic when animal shelters were closing to the public and so many people seemed to be adopting or fostering animals. This kitten came into our lives without warning, but even I can't deny that sometimes it does seem like the universe has a schedule that coincides with our wants and desires.

The acclimation process did not take as long for the kitten as it might have if he had been an older cat. Kami, our calico cat, did show her displeasure by hissing at the kitten, but thankfully there were no cat fights. Whenever the kitten got too close, Kami would tell him to back off, and he obliged most of the time.

When it finally seemed like this would be a permanent situation, we went through names. My aunt suggested we name him after my uncle's father George, but I scoffed. "That's not a good name for a cat. What about Georgie?"

And you know what? It stuck.

And so we called the kitten Georgie.

And so they lived happily ever after...?

Now, months and months in, Georgie has carved out his own little space in our makeshift family. He is growing up to be a happy, if spoiled, cat whose greatest worry is when his next feeding time is. He loves boxes and strings, he enjoys sitting by open windows and absorbing the sunlight, and he has found many different places to relax and sleep around our two-bedroom condo. Somehow, he found his fairy-tale ending, and we're so grateful to have him. He brings more joy into our lives every single day, and I can't say 2020 was my worst year—even though it was dismal in a lot of ways—because I met Georgie during that time.

Below are some cute candids of Georgie's life as he's grown over the past eight months. Forgive me for being indulgent, but I'm just that kind of cat mamma.

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