I was working on some other ideas for slices this morning, but nothing was coming together. I was bored by my own writing. Everything seemed ho-hum and blah. So I decided to try a format I’ve already used but change the topic. I promise that someday I will write again about something that is not a cat.
- His meow sounds like breaking glass. Luckily, he only uses it every so often to ask for porch time or to tell me that he needs love STAT.
- His has two frenemies: my son and our ginger #fosterfail, Oliver.
- He has a theme song. Here are the words, sung to the tune of Destiny’s Child’s “I’m a Survivor”: You’re a Chipotle, always Chipotle, perfect Chipotle, gorgeous Chipotle. I can go on in that vein for quite some time.
- He was a very sickly kitten, runny and drippy and wheezy and crusty and rattly. He’s still a bit drippy and wheezy.
- He’s uneven. The vet had a long story about fertilized eggs cleaving that I couldn’t really follow. I am sure there is a scientific explanation, but all I know is that one side is a little smaller than the other and he has a lot of whiskers in the wrong place.
- His face is the subject of much debate at our house. I think he’s absolutely exquisite. He looks like a little pirate. (He is frequently greeted with “Ahoy matey!” when he comes into the room.) Or a little frog. (He gets a lot of loud “Ribbit!”s too.) Or maybe a Pokemon character. My son says he’s grotesquely deformed and hideous. Anytime we see an image of an ugly creature, he yells, “It’s Chipotle!”
- He’s the least photogenic cat I’ve ever had. I often say you can’t take a bad photo of a cat. But then there’s Chipotle. His eyes water, and he squints a lot, and he has an unfortunate tendency to yawn every time I take his photo. I have hundreds of photos of him, and there are literally five good ones. In fact, the photographic evidence on my phone would suggest that he’s really quite homely. By contrast, I couldn’t find a single photo of his brother, Panda, that wasn’t cat calendar ready.
- He got separated from his mother when I was trapping his feral family and spent three days on his own outside before I could catch him. Every morning and every night he cried piteously for his mama. On the third morning, I lay in the dirt by the abandoned camper where he’d been born and talked to him gently. For two hours, I talked and he cried. Finally, he crept out, crawled over to me, and let me pick him up and carry him inside. I couldn’t get my hands on him for another two months.
- He is a one-person cat, and I am that person. We have daily smoochie time where he gets in my lap and I coo and whisper sweet nothings and he purrs and beams and presses his cheek to mine. He will tolerate my husband but his body language makes it clear that he’d really rather not be touched by him.
- He is scared of only one thing: my son’s pterodactyl cry. This is strictly forbidden in our house, but occasionally it comes out anyway. Chipotle ducks and looks frantically at the ceiling and runs for cover. Those feral instincts are never too far away.
- His name makes me smile every time I say it. My son gave it to him, and also named Toast and Panda. It turns out that food words make for really fun cat names.
the dirigible plum 
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