bandit

Page

sunday 20 february 2011

Not a name I would have chosen for any animal, but I say again that I had a small child, and children like to name animals. I got to choose his MIDDLE names, which were Blandiens Bendybones Bum. Yeah, yeah. You like the KID'S choice better.

We got this little bandit out of the laundromat in the first week of September 1986, a basically white cat with large patches of dark-brown tiger. Child and I were there doing our usual Saturday stint with laundry, and there were these two rather infamous townies in there with a kitten sleeping in the woman's lap. The kitten was wearing a flea collar, and I naturally assumed that that kitten belonged to that woman. But when she left, she and her companion got up and left the kitten in the chair. He didn't stay asleep long once he'd lost that warm body.

So, of course, the next humans he came to flatter were my kid and me. Blandiens, that name you don't like, is the Latin for "flattering." Bandit was an inveterate flatterer. When he wanted something, he would rub up against you oh-so-adoringly, and make these sweet little high-pitched sounds in his throat. As far as I ever saw, it worked every time. The woman who owned the laundry said she was sure the kitten belonged to no one because he'd been hanging around for several days. I argued that he was wearing a flea collar, a sure sign that he did, in fact, belong to someone. But she defeated my reasoning by saying that whoever it was obviously didn't want the kitten anymore, and that people in downtown Turners were forever getting cats and then tossing them out forever when they were tired of them. Really? say I. I'd only been in Turners a year, and spent little time there, as my weekdays were spent 9-5 on the campus of UMass. There was a lot I didn't yet know about the town. A year or two after this day, I had learned to advertise on radio and in the paper before I kept any lost animal I found. I didn't want to take an animal someone loved and missed. But on this particular laundry Saturday, I took this woman's word that someone had rejected this kitten, and we took him home. He was smuggled up the back stairs in a brown paper grocery bag so no fellow-tenants would see him. I hadn't yet asked the landlord if I could have a cat, and I didn't want some asinine butt-brain getting to the landlord before I did.

When I reached him a few days later, he said the cat was okay. So began Bandit's time with us.

I don't know how many weeks went by before I was standing on my back porch and saw at the edge of the woods a cat who was the spitting image of our little Bandit, except that he was full-grown and dirty. I called my daughter and pointed out the cat. She makes a blase face. Ya ma, I know. That's Brandon's cat Bandit. That's why I named the kitten Bandit, because he looks just like that one. There had been a method to her madness, after all.
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.