Food chain in progress

latetoschool
Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:40:35 +0000

Marite, my friend’s cat is something else. If he were a person? He would be a tall, gangly, uncoordinated teenager with out of control red hair, freckles, a nose ring, and hands and feet too big for his body, and he would be very loud and have a touch of ADD. And his face would always be dirty.

My friend’s brother adopted him one day - he was walking back from the library to his housing at Princeton, and the cat followed him. So the cat ruled Princeton. Some months later, her brother was leaving for some sort of program in Israel, and his roommate was leaving for Yale, so, the cat was sent to Yale. Then, roommate graduated or something, so, my friend inherited the cat while waiting for her brother to come back to the U.S. He came back unexpectedly early - I cannot remember if it was Afghanistan or the start of the Iraq war. the state department cancelled his funding, so he came back, and began a job search, and he promised to take the cat back as soon as he was employed and settled.

Then, my friend got accepted to Tufts for her masters, so she took the cat there. But second year the financial aid stuff wasn’t quite working for her, so she got roommates to offset expenses, and one of those roommates didn’t do cats. By then, her brother was employed as a professor at Dartmouth, so, the cat was sent to him there.

But then, her brother was awarded some sort of prestigious something or another - I cannot remember what it is - a program where he will do research at the Vatican for an entire year, and, apparently Dartmouth was so impressed that they’re paying him his full salary for the entire year even though this program is paying him a stipend plus all living expenses. Anyway, the cat could not go to Italy, and my friend was couch-surfing as she was waiting for her renters to move out of her house in Arlington, so, the cat was sent to stay with mutual friends at grad school at Harvard.

He stayed there until my friend moved back into her home, just a few months ago, then the friends at Harvard delivered him back to Arlington.