Son has a kitten | The Press

I gave in. I ended up giving in. Those who know me well are the first to be surprised.

Son wanted a cat. He asked for this for Christmas. For my own birthday, a few weeks ago, I had a colonoscopy. We get the gifts we deserve. At endoscopy admissions, the nurse made a huge apology after recognizing me. I almost replied that I was Olivier Niquet.

“You have to look at the white cat, not the black cat,” my mother often says. We made a compromise. The cat is gray. Looks like a bath mat. I note it with the greatest affection.

To say that I was resistant to the idea of ​​welcoming a kitten into the house is an understatement. When this absurd idea germinated in the mind of Fiston, in the fall, two rival camps were immediately formed in the family. Enthusiasts and skeptics (another understatement).

I never had a pet when I was little. Not a single goldfish entered my parents’ house. I remember a little mouse that I was able to hold in the palm of my hand and feed during recess, at Saint-Léon school, in Madame Diane’s first year class. This was my only foray into the Animal Kingdom before adulthood (apart from the TV show presented by Mutuelle d’Omaha).

At university, in my first apartment, I gave my girlfriend a dwarf rabbit that she named Podouchka (“pillow”, in Russian). I had a delicious nickname for him: Civet (“stew” in French). In Czech, padushka – as it was pronounced – also translates as “scoundrel”. The rabbit gnawed the electrical wires until a fire was feared.

I lived in a roommate with a friend who always had cats… who always guessed, by instinct, that I was not their natural ally. “He will soften you. A little pet therapy will do you good! he wrote to me this week, when I sent him a photo of our kitten.

The only animal that had been tolerated in our house so far, for two decades, was a blue betta fish called Chewing Gum. It was surreptitiously replaced by another equally beta blue poison after its unexpected death. Son saw nothing but fire. Chewing Gum 2 also ended its days in the sewers of the City of Montreal.

I am not a “cat person”, as Kristen Roupenian would say (the author of a famous short story, CatPerson, published five years ago in the New Yorker). “Of course you’re a cat person, like all GOOD people! “, decreed Friday a friend, who of course has a cat. “A cat guy”, me? So let’s see…

To keep Sonny away from his video game console, I’m ready to revisit this received idea about my personality. And sacrifice some furniture to the claws of a baby feline. I’m already mourning the leather sofa in the living room. I only hope that Sonny’s infatuation with his kitten will last longer than his interest in the synthesizer that I bought him at a high price two Christmases ago…

It’s a little over two months old. In his first adoptive family, he was called Monsieur Le Gris. I campaigned unsuccessfully for Grizou or Zizou, betraying my inclination for French soccer. Son chose Loki instead, named after one of his favorite Marvel characters. If by chance we adopt her sister, we will call her Sylvie (“the real ones know”, as they say).

We cleaned the house in anticipation of his arrival this week. It hadn’t been so tidy in about two years. My girlfriend had to submit to the equivalent of a job interview or a credit check by the SPCA, in order to ensure that Mr. Le Gris had been entrusted to a stable, loving and sure. I probably would have been turned down if I had been questioned. They would have sent the inspectors after me.

It must be said that there is no shortage of homes to accommodate pets since the start of the pandemic. Last September, according to a Leger survey commissioned by the Association of Veterinary Physicians of Quebec (AMVQ), more than half of Quebec households (52%) had a cat or a dog. A first. Most of the increase came from the adoption of cats, present in 36% of households (compared to 31% in January 2020) and in 47% of households with children.

According to an AMVQ study carried out in the wake of some 700 Quebecers who adopted a cat or a dog between 1^er April 2020 and the 1^er October 2021, the first expression that comes to mind when asked what this animal means to them is “member of the family”, followed by the word “love” and, for cats, the word “child” .

This doesn’t surprise me too much, given that a certain person in my immediate circle – I won’t name anyone – addresses Loki as if he were a newborn. Don’t imagine that he failed to awaken a form of paternal instinct in me, with his gentle gaze, his two-stroke engine purr and his little pads. I don’t have a heart (completely) of stone.

What inspires me this parenthesis. No, I do not intend to talk to you now about Loki in this Sunday column, devoted for five years to family life (for those who have not yet noticed). No one knows how to talk about their cats like Foglia. I confessed to him one day that I was suspicious of those who prefer animals to people. He gave me a disapproving look over his glasses, while his cats came and went to his house as they pleased. I changed the subject. End of parenthesis.

Loki was meowing weakly behind the door as I finished this column. He already knows how to take me by the feelings. I let him in and he went and stuck his nose in the wires under my desk. I had to lure him with a toy to get him out of there. I feel that it will make me drool, this one.

Against all odds, I have to admit, I let myself be touched by this cute and affectionate little ball of fur. I’m afraid I’ve become what I never thought I’d become: a cat person.