It Was the Way He Treated the Kitten

I am getting married on 11/11 at 11 and, considering our first date, it is nothing short of a miracle. Here is our "story." After a "wink" and a "response" on one of those "adult" date and mate and "whatever" sites Mike and I corresponded for about a month and then chatted on the phone for another two or three weeks before our first "face-to-face." We decided, after getting acquainted enough to know we wanted more, to have dinner one Saturday night. Then, after a particularly long chat (ours lasted anywhere from a few minutes to several hours), we threw caution to the wind and decided, in addition to Saturday's more formal "dinner," to meet at my place Friday evening for movie and pizza. Well, Friday at just past 5:30AM, while awaiting the gal whose company does a weekly dub of a TV news magazine my company produces, I heard a rather hysterical "mew." It turned out to be a tiny kitten jammed into a hole in the crotch of the only tree left standing in an asphalt-paved parking lot; wedged in with a glass soda bottle and a cup, apparently left to starve to death or be captured by some animal, or, in this case, discovered by a push-over for a cute feline face. After enveloping my hand in a protective leather glove, lest she be rabid, etc., with my friend, Jacque, distracting her from behind, I extricated her from her arbor prison and placed her into a corrugated cardboard box with sides too high for her to climb and escape; and I went inside to do my dub. Once done with that, and allowing for time for the SPCA to open, I placed her on the big front counter and gingerly reached in to check on her and to display her to the SPCA gal. After some initial hissing and spitting, the gal determined the little furball was OK and instructed me to stop by the agency's Spay-Neuter clinic in a town just over the river. At that counter the gal told me she was too small to be spayed (even I knew THAT already!) and should be checked by a veterinarian and dewormed before exposure to my 12-year-old red tiger cat, Sunny (Senor Sunny Santiago to be exact). My "assignment" complete, I introduced little "Salvadora Arboleda" to her older brother, locked her in my guest bathroom with food and water and milk and headed back to catch up with my workday. I called Mike to warn him our first "date" would be spent, at least by me, dropper feeding a kitten; he was still more than welcome to come, but to understand, please, the situation. Mike arrived right on time to find me barefooted, in my blue denim overalls and an old yellow T-shirt, hair flying in 12 directions, with no makeup, just a splash of fragrance. After ushering him onto the sofa to relax and put the two pizzas I ordered from Pizza Hut and he picked up on the way onto the coffee table, I withdrew to the kitchen to mix up a batch of KMR, Kitten Milk Replacement to feed to "Dorrie," as I called her. When I emerged from the kitchen to fetch Dorrie from her bathroom prison, lo and behold, there is Mike, also now barefooted, all 6-foot-two, 285, former football player, former military of him, lying on his tummy, half in my guest john, half in the hallway, playing with, murmuring and singing to "Dora," his instant nickname for the skaking, quaking, shivering, frightened ball of fluff who had plastered herself against the back wall of the bathroom, behind the toilet, unable to get an farther away from us. My heart melted. Despite the lousy pizza (the guy on the phone at Pizza Hut had explained they were extremely busy, but I did not know until too late it meant my two-fer medium pizzas would arrive with precious little pepperoni on one and mushrooms on the other and almost no sauce and cheese on either........actually, the boxes containing them would probably have been tastier and certainly easier to swallow!) and the unorthodox activity and my obvious lack of concern for my appearance, things went much better and feelings ran much deeper than either Mike or I realized at the time. I fully expected Mike to either call me the next day with some ridiculous excuse about why he could not make dinner or simply not to show up at all after the less than stimulating first date the previous evening. And Mike, unbeknownst to me, believed me to be as uninterested in him as I thought him to be about me; but he had said to himself, "either she'll call to cancel, blow me off completely or I am going to marry her." Needless to say, we both showed up for dinner the next night, him to pick me up and me waiting inside and we have been almost inseparable since then. Love bloomed and soon translated into his taking me home to meet his folks (my parents, unfortunately, are both gone) and his old-fashioned proposal on one knee. On November 11th 2006 we will exchange our vows in an historic old park just outside Charleston, beneath the bell tower remains of a chapel on the grounds of a nearly destroyed old Confederate fort; with his dad as bests man, his mom as matron of honor and with my business partner and his son giving me away. Because of my work with the Latino community, we plan to share those vows in both English and Spanish before inviting guests to join us on the banks of the Ashley River to celebrate the first day of the next fifty years of our life together.

 

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