Surprise LOLcat, invisible mommy :(

So ever since I knew I was going to be in Mie Prefecture, close to Nagoya, I kept joking that I should ask my host family if they'd like to give me their cat, Kira. They didn't pay much attention to her, and she grew to adore me so much that she would be in my room every morning at 7 am demanding a tummy-rub, and when I left to go back to the States she was forlorn for weeks.

I've always wanted a kitty, but mum is none too fond of them, so we had a couple dogs throughout my childhood and then we moved to a third-floor apartment on the north side of Chicago. Not the best environment for large dogs, which are the kind my dad likes especially. Practically speaking, what with figuring out how to take care of myself adequately in a foreign country, a cat is the last thing I need here in my little teacher's hovel distracting me from my teacherly duties such as prepping future lessons outside of class.

Well, mother nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently she felt the absence of felines in my life has gone on long enough. For no reason in particular, I decided to take the shortcut home from school today. Usually it's an overgrown deer trail leading back into a bug-infested fen which sprouts an old disused concrete road that goes through a forest and comes out behind my apartment building. The city workers occasionally go through and mow down all the weeds, though, and this weekend they did a stellar job with the non-forested areas of the shortcut. Anyway, it connects with the school grounds by way of a small footpath behind the baseball field. So I was headed down that way, when I spied a tiny orange-ish something faintly mewling on the blacktop. Thus was a little bundle of trouble dropped into my life by the hand of Chaos, who always likes a good laugh.
I don't want to pretend that I have the authority to name him (as T.S. Eliot makes abundantly clear, no humans may know the secret names of cats), but I've been calling him "Tomo" in my head. As in "tomodachi," or "friend," which is what he desperately needed when I found him. He was half-soaked, probably more than half-starved, scared, and hardly strong enough to stumble over to me when I held out my hand. Neither mommy nor siblings nor potential owners were anywhere in sight. I think it most likely that the heavy rains we've been getting washed him down from the mountains in one of the drainage ditches and he crawled out of the little stream that runs into a gully back in the woods next to my shortcut home. I took him back to the school office to get him some milk and a warm towel, and to look up the closest animal hospitals / shelters. Of course, everything in Japan closes at 3, and though the office ladies and the male teachers alike avowed that he was the most adorable thing ever, they didn't want him to be their problem. I'll admit I was pretty smitten with him from the start. So the landlord to my building, who works for the school, drove me home with Tomo bundled in the towel and basically said "Good luck, hope you figure something out."

My mom will probably be very relieved to hear that, with the help of AJ and Ayumi, and a former teacher from my high school who lives just down the road, I did figure something out. Tomo will spend a week at my place, and then go to a kindly older woman, the mother of one of my adult English students in the class at the community center AJ and I teach every other Tuesday. She will most likely spoil him rotten with love and affection and make him into a fat, dumb, and happy housecat.

I keep telling myself that this is the way it will turn out over and over again to fight down the frequent spikes of panic over my total inexperience with caring for abandoned kittens. If this is even a smidgeon of what new mothers feel like, I am for sure never having babies. Anyway, AJ and Ayumi have a cat, so they generously donated some cat necessities to Tomo. Chief among them being the kitty litter, without which he would literally hold in his dirty business until it killed him. That's one among the many interesting and harrowing facts I have learnt about kittens in the past several hours since getting home, putting Tomo in a box lined with old towels, and going "Crap, what now??? O___O"

Tomorrow he goes to the vet to assess his general health and probably take a chunk out of my wallet. I'm gonna wait out the week and let his owner-to-be get him all the shots and everything, but I'm willing to bet even a routine kitty check-up in Japan doesn't come cheap. Plus if he's picked up any mites during his stint in the great outdoors, I'm gonna want those gone before I bring him back into the apartment. He may be the cutest little fuzzball in the world, but it's gonna be a whole lot easier getting rid of him if it turns out he has brought parasites into my living space.