I'm Back

I took a vacation. I had a great time. But I'm back, now.

There’s nothing to do at this point but come clean.

After Féline died, I found the emptiness in my apartment so unbearable that I called a local animal rescue group. Was there any chance, I asked, that they might need someone to foster one of their charges? I’d be happy to care for an abandoned cat, I told them. Or a dog. Or a llama, a ferret, a raccoon, a bird—anything, just so long as it was alive.

Laurence took down my name and my contact information, and she asked me a few questions about my apartment. Had I ever cared for an animal before? Did I understand that animals can do quite a bit of damage to my furniture? Were my windows screened to prevent escapes?

Hell, yes.

I explained my considerable experience in these domains, and sent her a photo of my furniture to illustrate that it had already been destroyed. (Scratch it, barf on it, eat it—build yourself a dam, foster beaver: It can’t possibly look worse.)

I stressed that I was very, very responsible. I didn’t hear back from her right away, though, and I began to worry she’d concluded I was a desperate psycho.

Then, last Friday, the phone rang. It was Laurence. Would I be free on Saturday to pick up a litter of foster kittens?

Kittens?

I picked up my charges on Saturday morning. My father came with me. We arrived at an adorable scene: In the lobby, row after row of cat carriers and about a dozen volunteers, looking for their new fosters. Every volunteer’s name is written on a carrier. Apparently, people throughout the region contact this association when they discover an animal in distress. Once a week, the president of the group drives around the Île-de-France in her van to pick them up, bring them back to Paris, and distribute them to their foster families.

The biggest carrier had my name on it.

I looked inside and pert-near melted on the spot:

Please meet my foster kittens. They’re three months old. They’re in perfect health. They have limitless energy. Their curiosity and appetite for life is one of the great natural wonders of the world.

The poor little things were just terrified, at first, when I brought them home. Of course they were. Someone had snatched them up, put them in a cage, taken them somewhere in a van—and now, they were in some strange place with a strange woman who smelled like strange cats, and they had no idea what happened to their mom. (She is being spayed, I understand, and given a stern lecture.)

They didn’t want to leave the carrier. When finally they emerged, they ran for cover, then hid and cowered behind the toilet, quiet as mice. They stayed there all day and all night. (I don’t know how much they’ve been handled by humans, but my guess is “not very much,” because they really didn’t seem used to it.)

But their desire to be kittens—to gambol in the wondrous playground of cardboard boxes, paper bags, catnip mice, and feather-toys I’d built for them in my bedroom—soon began to trump their fear. At first they only came out at night, when they thought I was asleep, but they’ve become a bit braver every day. Now, they’re even letting me pet and hold them without trying to flee, though they’re too young and squirmy to put up with it for long.

My job is to feed them, socialize them, take them for their scheduled vet visits, send regular reports on their well-being and comportment to Laurence, and permit prospective adopters to visit so they can meet them.

The only problem is that I already love them so much that if anyone comes over here trying to “adopt” my kittens, I’ll tear them limb from limb with my bare hands.

(In the trade, this is known as a “foster fail.”)

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Their names are Goober, Goblin, Huckleberry, and Linus. Linus is the black one. He’s very timid, which melts my heart. Huckleberry is the darkest tabby. Goblin is the slightly-lighter tabby. Goober is the littlest one—and by far the most intrepid. They’re boys, except for Goblin. (I think. Sexing kittens is tricky.)

You’ll notice they’re dead ringers for Zeki, Suley, Mo, and Toshiro. They looked exactly like them at the same age.

They’ve brought life and joy back into my home and I’m utterly in love. Waking up to the sound of frisking, hearing those little kitten squeaks, floods me with happiness. I’ve missed those sounds so much.

They’re so new to life, and they’re so enchanted with it, and I’m so enchanted with them. I could do nothing but play with them for hours.

And that, of course, is the problem.

I’ve been working on four essays this week. One is about what we might expect of a Kamala Harris foreign policy. The second treats the baleful triumph of Edward Said and his influence on our culture and politics. The third is about recent events in Israel and Gaza. The last one concludes my thoughts about the policy I’ve called “Responsible Retreat.” I’ve also got some special events to announce and some interesting podcasts to edit and post, too.

They’ll all be good essays, when they’re done, and really, they’re all almost done. But none of them are quite right yet. I’ve vowed, every day this week, to finish and publish at least one of them, for God’s sake. But for some reason, I haven’t quite been able to muster the concentration I need to really focus, word by word, on what I’m writing.

(For some mysterious reason.)

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It’s just so much more fun to play with a litter of three-month-old kittens than it is to think about the six executed hostages in Gaza, or Kamala Harris’s deep thoughts about foreign policy, or the long list of the world’s ills and miseries about which I’d been thinking, productively, until these little goobers showed up. It’s certainly more fun than thinking about the upcoming US election and how anxious I am about that.

But now, my anxiety about getting nothing done is becoming dreadful in its own right. I can’t let this go on, lovely though it’s been.

So I hereby declare the past week, retrospectively, my “long-scheduled vacation.” (Hell, Andrew Sullivan takes a full month off in August. So does everyone in France. Dedicating a week to joy and escapism every now and again isn’t that unreasonable.)

I had a wonderful time on my vacation. I needed it so badly—you have no idea how badly. (I had no idea, either.)

But my vacation has now come to an end. You’ll receive GLOBAL EYES later today, so that we’re all caught up on the news, and I’ll be back on schedule tomorrow, no matter what adorable new discoveries about life these little munchkins make. Because life isn’t all about kittens.

But kittens are part of life. Their existence is a miracle. They’re perfect little creatures.

It’s true that we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, but to look at these little faces—so perfect, so innocent, so young, so healthy—is to know that we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds, either.