Love at First Sight

With her permission I have borrowed this from our daughter Jenna’s FaceBook post this week after the loss of their beloved cat LuLu…. (Courtesy of Jenna Spain Hurley)

When we first moved to Bahrain, we were working really long hours, and we would come home to find Jack frantically waiting for us at the door. We decided he needed a friend, so we went to Bahrain’s only no-kill facility to see who we could find.

We went looking for a specific kitten, a beautiful calico nicknamed Edward Scissorhands who wanted absolutely nothing to do with us. As I stood in the cattery, looking around, this little scrawny orange tabby circled through my ankles. I picked her up, and she curled up on my chest. I told Matt that I knew in that moment that she was mine.

I say “mine,” but really, Matt was her North Star. She adored him. Once, he went on a work trip to Kuwait, and Lu wandered the halls, yowling, like it was my fault he wasn’t there.

We named her Lu’Lu’ – Arabic for pearl, in honor of the Pearl Roundabout, the Arab Spring rallying point in Bahrain that had been destroyed not long before we got there, in the regime’s bid to get the protests under control. She ended up living up to the spirit of that name, a feisty little chaos agent who was the manic energy we never knew we needed in our lives.

For years, she rode on Matt’s shoulder like a parrot. She stole every pair of athletic shorts and shoes with strings, always stashing them in her water bowl for us to find. She murdered Christmas trees with vigor. When I tried to outsmart her by getting a vinyl adhesive tree, that little maniac plucked the vinyl ornaments off it with serious serial killer energy. One of our friends pointed out that she was also the poster child for feline RBF.

The biggest surprise, though, was how she took to the boys. She loved them like her own and was remarkably patient in the face of Gabriel’s grabbiest instincts. She was a beautiful, manic ninja of a cat, and we will love her forever.

May we be bearers of hope, the “wait staff” of Hope’s Café for each other and all those we encounter.  Shalom, Kate 

Hope’s Cafe Bonus: “I think having an animal in your life makes you a better human.” – Rachael Ray “Our pets are our family.”