by Don Turner

Created on: March 02, 2009

Itty Bitty, the Calico Kitty

No one else in my family remembers this. A few years ago I told my mother and my sister this story from forty-five years earlier. They were both there when it happened. The story didn't sound familiar to them. Maybe I just dreamed it but I don't think so. It feels much more like a memory than a dream. But I'm the only one who remembers Itty Bitty, the calico kitty.

I was ten or eleven years old. We lived in a neighborhood where one side of the road had only old mill-hill style rental houses that had seen better days and the other side of the road had snooty folks in nice new homes with telephones and paved driveways dotted by new cars.

Guess which side of the road I lived on.

My house and all its mill-hill companions are gone now, torn down long ago. Years after I left home, the owner told my parents he was selling the land and they would have to move. That news sent my father on a drinking spree he couldn't survive. My mother moved to her next home as a widow.

Now, it's as though part of my life doesn't exist anymore. A new post office stands on the spot where I lived for more than ten years. That forty-dollars-a-month, sagging-roofed house held a lot of unpleasant memories; but it has come to mean much more to me over time. The purpose of this story is to preserve one bitter-sweet memory from the time I lived there.

There was a half-acre field covered with scrub trees and tall weeds between our house and the neighbor's house. My father and I had occasionally planted a garden in that field but it usually was just grown over with weeds.

The meany twins lived in the house on the other side of the field. Their real last name was Means and they weren't actually twins; but the name suited them, so that's what I called them. They had only lived there a few months. The meany twins were brothers about my age, real trouble-makers. I tried to be friends with them but when they started blowing up mailboxes with cherry bombs I decided they were too wild for me.

One day I was in my front yard when I saw the meany twins standing in the road beside the field between our houses. They were throwing rocks. The ditch along the road had a three foot high bank where field rats often scurried; I figured they were throwing rocks at rats. I had done that with them a few times before. So I picked up a couple of rocks and ran up the road to join them.

This time it wasn't rats they were throwing rocks at. It was a tiny scared-to-death kitten, the smallest cat I had

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