User:Phbrownacmorg/sandbox/csc125fa21/WA1/Peter Brown

How my family got a cat

One morning in the late summer of 2009, I heard a mewing coming from the crawl space under my house. I made a mental note to deal with the kitten that had evidently moved in, and went on about my business.

Jesús, shortly after coming out of the crawl space

That summer, my older daughter had a friend living with us. The girls got to the cat before I did, luring it out from underneath the house with food.

Now, they say that if you feed a cat, you've got a cat. Which was all well and good, except that my family is full of asthmatics, and some of us are specifically allergic to cats. (Breathing is not a good habit to break.) So my daughter and her friend had to figure out how to get my consent to keeping the cat.

My daughter decided to up the stakes by naming the cat Jesus. As in, "Where were you when I was hungry, and cold," and mewing...

About that time, I remembered that, unlike my own childhood in New Jersey, winters are warm enough in South Carolina that keeping an outdoor cat is actually possible. So we were able to keep the cat and still breathe.

The name Jesus stuck until it came time to get the cat neutered (he did turn out to be male). Unable to handle neutering Jesus, I renamed the cat Jesús—in Spanish that name isn't quite as specific as it is in English.

Jesús lived with us for six years—a long time for an outdoor cat.