Chapter One: The Red Cap - the very beginning

How I ended up in a red baseball cap, I have no idea.

I was shivering. I was the size of a small bird curled up in the bottom of the cap that belonged to a man who discovered me on a steep hill side that was blanketed with a tangled mass of foliage and cactus and plunged over limestone cliffs to the South Shore Rd. in Bermuda. Far below me, I heard the crash of waves on the rocky shoreline of Watch Hill Park, and filtering through the fabric, I felt the crisp, ocean breeze of a cold November night.

I was mewling pathetically. My eyes were barely open. I don't remember who my mother was or if I had brothers and sisters. Voices swirled overhead saying that someone must have ptiched me out of a car onto the cliffs to get rid of me. This made me mewl louder. I never did anything naughty. Who would want to "get rid" of me? Asides, no one was paying attention to how hungry I was. When a large, pink finger, dripping with a white bubble of milk, appeared overhead, I snatched the milk with my tongue and bit down hard, hoping to find more. My teeth were needle sharp. I broke the skin on the finger and tasted blood. May I assure you, I did not do this on purpose.

When the screech of the woman who owned the finger subsided, she replaced it with a soft bird-like cooing. "It's just a baby," she said. "Ahhhhhh...oooohhhhhhh.....ahhhhhhh. Isn't it beautiful?" Beautiful? It? It's me. Hungry kitty. I wished she would just shut up and give me some more milk.

"I'll take care of it until it gets larger, and then find it a home," the woman said. There was that 'it' thing again, and I wondered what the word "home" meant. Shortly after, I was lapping up more streams of milk as it flowed over her finger tips and was careful, this time, not to clamp down on her skin. I sighed. My balloon belly was full, gurgling with contentment. I flopped on my back, a blissfully, happy black and white kitten, and went to sleep, still in the red cap.

You know, that was the beginning. The beginning of my life. I don't remember my birth, but I do remember that my new Mummy did not have the elegant, sensuous face of a cat. She did not have long, handsome whiskers. She did not have blazing yellow eyes nor a pink sandpaper tongue to wash my face. She did not have a soft, furry belly nor feline teats to feed me. Yet, I look at her now, and when she tells me that I am still beautiful, even after seventeen years, I know she is most wonderful Mummy I could have wished for. I know she has loved me intensely every minute since she first saw me curled in the bottom of the red cap.

And you know what? I love her just as intensely in return.