Day 45 of 100

“Can we keep her?”

I was holding a small kitten with a brown stripe down her forehead using my best puppy dog eyes on my mom.

“No.”

I had always wanted a cat. My parents were against it. I knew that they were wrong, very wrong.

So I hatched a plan with my friend Alex.

Alex had moved pretty far away with his mom, but she wanted him to continue to go to the same school, so every morning he would get dropped off at my house and we would walk to school together.

His neighbor’s cat had kittens and we decided that one of those kittens should live with me. One morning Alex wasn’t alone when he came to my house.

The plan was he would put a piece of salami with the kitten outside my front door then ring the doorbell and run. I would open the door, see the kitten and then with all the skill I could muster ask my mom if we could keep her.

It was early one morning and I was sitting on the couch waiting for the doorbell. It rang. I leapt up, ran to the door, opened it, and sitting there eating a piece of salami was the smallest kitten I had ever seen.

“Mom! Someone let a kitten on our doorstep! Can we keep her?”

My mom walked over to the door, looked at the kitten, looked at me, stuck her head out the door and yelled, “Alex get your ass in here!”

Sheepishly, he came walking from around the bushes and towards the house.

“You can’t keep this kitten, Micah. Put it in the garage until we can return it.”

I sat in that garage for three days with Stripe until we finally drove it back to its home.

A few months later, at Christmas, my parents handed me a big box. Inside that box was a tiny orange and white long haired kitten that looked at me and meowed. She was a rescue that had been abused horribly and because she had a slight limp, we called her Gimpy.

At seven, I think Gimpy was my first love.