Cats

Back in the early eighties Mark had a cat named Ernie. Poor Ernie died on the operating table after he ate a lot of nylon. So Mark went to visit his parents; they knew people who had kittens. Mark narrowed his choice down to two which looked exactly alike, a male and a female. He couldn't decide so took them both. He named them Simon and Shuster. Then just days later Mark and I were having breakfast at Pronto Restaurant in Provincetown when our friend Tom Rosenkampf came in. That was out of the ordinary; Tom didn't really like restaurants.  He sat down next to us and said to Mark, "I heard you might be looking for a new cat." Mark said he had got two over the weekend. Tom pulled from his Army fatigue coat's pocket the tiniest little kitten.  "I was out in that storm last night and I heard this meowing and ...." Mark couldn't resist taking it. It got named Emma Gray. It was too young to have been weaned; we fed it with an eye-dropper.  Because it was so young it identified with we who fed it and so spent her entire life thinking she was not a cat but a human. She was different!