City Fauna

Hey there, buddy.

It was late morning and I had found a coffeeshop with excellent coffee, delicious pastries, The New York Times (I was in New York, so it was still fresh), and a shady porch. Heaven. The farthest thing on earth away from a city danger. Until I was accosted and adorably, awkwardly attacked by a hungry kitten.

The creatures that roam our city streets fall roughly in two categories: rodents/pests and Things On Leashes.  I guess there are also birds, but for every graceful peregrine falcon in its skyscraper perch, there are blathering armies of aimless, pooping pidgeons, which fit nicely into the first category. How unlikely then that I should meet such an enterprising member of the city-jungle's third estate:  part-pest, part-TOL, part-neither.

My initial attempts to shoo the stray kitty away from my cinnamon roll involved using my newspaper and saucer to push her off the table, which was successful only in soliciting a series of low, adorable, "no, c'mon" noises.  I then proceeded to lay my paper over my pastry. Momentary confusion and even more irresistible purring, followed by some pouty stares ("What are you doing to it? Why are you SO awful?"). This song and dance played out for all of about ten minutes, while I smiled nervously at the other patrons of the coffeehouse in an attempt to fend off their critical, urban glances.

Eventually, I just gobbled up my cinnamon roll in front her (in retrospect, mean) and went inside, defeated, to sit by a window. I spend the next hour peering up from my paper to watch her use the same persistent and irresistible pitch to score bites from about a half dozen artisan sandwiches and a couple sips of french press. Happily, everyone else was trying to appear as nonchalant about this insatiable menace as a I had, straining their hardest to maintain their coffeehouse behavior and avoid making the sort of scene that would have actually been necessary to get the cat to leave.

Incidentally, the coffee was perfect.

This is not my cat.