(Michelle [MASKeteers] suggested that the readers of FML might like the
following, which is a true story about someone who loved me when I was very
small, and _very_ alone)
 
My Mother, Paddy
 
   I was adopted as a baby, when I was just a few days old.  My adoptive
parents were about the worst possible choice to raise a baby, and as a
result, my early life was almost completely unmitiaged hell.  But doesn't it
say in one of the Psalms, "Though I make my bed in Hell, Thou are with me?"
Sometimes God's messengers come in unexpected guises.  And just as there are
people so univerally wise and able that, regardless of nations, they are
truly citizens of the whole world, there are living beings that are so great
of mind, soul, and heart that they belong to the whole living universe, not
one species alone.  This is about one of them -- Paddy, a cat.
   The only person of _any_ kind present when I was first brought into their
home in San Gabriel, CA by the D****s, when I was 9 days old, was their cat.
This cat was 8 years old at the time;  she had been neutered as a kitten, and
like many neutered cats her age, she had begun to exhibit a surprisingly
catholic maternal streak.  Other cats in her position tend to go out and
adopt, say, somebody's pet rat, or a puppy, or a bunny, or whatever -- she
adopted _me_.
   Her name was Paddy.  She was given that name as a small kitten, because,
when presented with a variety of small toys, she chose as her favorite a ball
of that brilliant emerald color also called "paddy green."
   Paddy was a master gopher-hunter -- even far on into old age, when her
shoulders and upper arms were painfully crippled by arthritis, she went after
every gopher in the area, for the sheer joy of it.  She caught most of them,
too.  When her shoulders finally became so stiff with arthritis she could no
longer hunt normally, she developed the technique of biting off an extremely
long blade of grass, or a long leaf off a tasty weed, lying down with it in
her mouth just below the rim of the gopher-hole so she couldn't be seen from
below, the leaf or blade of grass hanging down _into_ the hole from above,
and waiting until the resident came up to check out the free feed.  That's
when she'd nail him or her -- she experimented until she found out exactly
where to lurk by the hole so that she could easily grab him with one pass,
even with her stiff shoulders, as soon as he came up, and after that, she had
no problem getting gophers.
   Paddy raised me to appreciate both the skills and joys of hunting --
though with me, it also turned into a love of fishing, somehow -- as well as
all the ninja skills and viewpoints of the cat tribe.  She loved me dearly,
and did her very best to try to give me what I'd need to survive in the
world.  Of course, being a cat, there was so much she _couldn't_ give me.
But she knew this, and so she somehow communicated to me one overpowering
idea:  "Find the people like yourself -- they are the only ones who can
possibly give you all the rest of what you will need in life."
     Why did she adopt me?  Why did she love me?  Well, she sort of needed a
kitten to adopt about then, and I was the nearest one that needed a mother,
the one crying the loudest.  I was one _weird_-looking kitten, no hair, ears
not worth talking about, no tail -- but she loved me.  She even gave me a
diminutive of her own name as her name for me:  "Pedd."  A song she somehow
sang to me still runs through my head:  "You _are_ a cat.  ... Your fur is on
inside-out, your tail is on backward, and your ears are on upside-down ...
but you _are a cat_.  You are."  That was her, reassuring herself that indeed
I was her kitten, however strange I
 
[Posted in FML issue 0804]