Carmen Can Juggle Too.

Perhaps the best single juggling episode happened one dark and stormy night in 1999. The odd part is- I wasn't there.


May 14th it was- the night of Black Cat Coffee House at the First Unitarian Church of Orlando. Carmen wanted to go. I had just loaded two 40 foot trailers with a steaming heap of television news scenery. I stayed home. Carmen left early, stopping by the Spiral Circle Book Store on the way. Just so you know, the Spiral Circle is a popular dumping ground for unwanted kittens. Well, you guessed it: there were two tiny tiny white kittens there hiding under the steps. Carmen took a deep cleansing breath, and left them there.

She called me from the church while she waited for the coffee house to start up. She described the two tiny tiny kittens, how cute they were and how vulnerable. Her Itty Bitty had died a few months earlier, so I knew where this was headed. "If you want to bring them home, it's okay with me," I said. She would think about it.

As soon as the thunderstorm started, I knew the outcome. Carmen and two other women- Susan and Susan- drove in the pouring rain, thunder and lightning to the Spiral Circle. It was a building up on blocks, with wooden stairs and room to crawl around in the mud. I sort of wish I'd been there to see them chasing these tiny terrified kittens around- but if I had been, I would have been crawling around in the mud in the pouring rain too. Whew! That was close!

After we dried them off and put them in their little bed, they curled up together in a yin/yang circle. Yin is the feminine, yang masculine. There you are.

The next morning we took these four-week-old flame point Siamese dumped-by-a-breeder kittens to our vet. Two weeks after that, our vet bought a new Lexus. Coincidence? They had every parasite known to kittendom. Yang had two surgeries in July. Yin was blind (no pupils in her eyes) and her spine is slightly deformed. The vet said he'd be surprised if they lived four years. Yang died at nine, and Yin is over ten years old now, and trying to cajole me out of my desk chair.