On September 25, 2022, while Lea and I walked Juan Pancho Street near Forestry at UPLB, we picked up a kitten that was crying loudly. I can still hear her cries. I was the one who first recognized the cry. I even asked where it was coming from. Turns out, we didn’t have to look any further. The cry was coming from along the road. We saw the kitten. It was covered with flies. Small yellowish grains, which I now know were fly eggs covered the poor kitten’s left ear and legs. They smelled like rotten fish.
The dilemma that lea and I had to face was whether to take the kitten or not. I asked Lea. I was calculating, thinking about the stress and the time it will take to take care of such a small young creature. And yet Lea was never calculating. She just said we should take the kittenn for it was pitiful. That plain decisive utterance was enough to touch that compassionate part of me that many have not won had Lea not been there with me as I was walking. I didn’t think of it this way at that time, but Lea, indeed, knows what is right and wrong intuitively (in her personal moral compass) and love just flows from her sometimes. Nontransactional. No calculations. Just immediate. The gift response.
So we picked the kitten up. We looked for something to wrap it around. We didn’t have any cloth with us, so I removed the kutsinta we bought earlier out of its brown paper bag and put the kitten inside that small bag as I carried it with both of my hands: one hand (the right) holding the kitten’s body and the other holding it on its scruff. I had Lea take over the couple fund waller and buy ingredients for our lunch, while I walked directly to the house under the sun to clean the kiten up.
It was silent for most of the walk home. Perhaps the sunlight was soothing its skin. Back at home, I cleaned it up using some warm water and the scrub with the antibacterial soap. I remembered the dead cat I saw the day before while walking at Melanio A. Gapud and can’t help but to think whether that death and this lost kitten were ever connected. The kitten is orange like the dead cat I saw.
After bathing the animal, I dried it up using the cats’ towel and placed it inside the carrier to rest. I warmed a bottle of water and placed it inside the cage for heat. It immediately got near it and quickly dried its fur. It went to sleep for a long time.
In the late afternoon, Lea and I bought a nursing bottle (P180) and milk replacement powder (P150). When we got home, we tried feeding it with the bottle to no avail. I think a dropper is the best bet, but since I didn’t have one, I used the syringe for now. We fed the cat every three hours using the powdered milk. It was a struggle, but the hesitation I once felt when deciding to pick the kitten up has faded away. I remembered Oreo and Gripo and how I failed them and how I was given the chance to redeem myself and help a soul.
I remembered henry bugbee and the purpose of reflection—to be decisive in one’s action at this moment. I remembered thich nhat hanh and compassion. I remembered walt whitman and his passion in helping the wounded during the war. I felt that this was an opportunity to make someone else’s life thrown—literally thrown—become a gift once more. And who would’ve thought that I will go this far in taking care of one soul? This place transforms people. It has transformed me.
I detailed the fate of this kitten, which I named Keeley in the poem I wrote: today i buried a kitten