My Writing Companion, Hendrix

Hendrix napping

I adopted Hendrix from the Salt Lake County Animal Shelter in I think October back in 2017. Or, I should say, he adopted me. 

The cattery at the animal shelter has an odd setup. There's a main room with kennels, with a short hall off of it with more kennels, all for individual cats and young kittens. In addition, there are four colony rooms for cats who get along with other cats, and most of the cats there were in the colony rooms. I was with my mom that day, and she told me to take my time, there was no rush. I looked at a lot of the individual cats, and ended up down the little offshoot hall considering two neighboring kitties. Mom came down and advised me to look in the colony rooms.

Well, one of the colony rooms didn't have many cats—that was the one right next to the hallway. Across from the hallway were colony rooms One, Two, and Three, from right to left. The cats in Number Three looked sort of listless, just lying around doing nothing. An elderly couple was in the process of entering room Number Two, so I moved toward Colony Room Number Three.

The doors to all the colony rooms had windows in them, as well as the walls beside the doors. To the right of Colony Room Number One's door was its window, and in that window was a funky looking cat tree with horizontal posts covered in carpeting attached to a vertical post. A yellowy cat climbed that cat tree as I approached, yowling continually—though I couldn't hear it, the cat's mouth kept opening. 

I opened the door and took two steps in, still with the door open, and turned to face Mom and tell her I was looking in this room first. Now, I had a messenger-bag style backpack on and it was kind of hanging by my left side under my arm, and that yellowy cat put its front paws on it, meowing. I chuckled a little, amused by this cat's friendliness, and the cat hopped onto my backpack, then proceeded to climb up until it could circle around the back of my head. My sound of surprise drew the attention of the family with young children who were looking in a kennel across the way at kittens up for adoption, and Mom laughed when she saw the cat climbing all over me.

Mom said, "I think you found your cat!"

While I wrangled the cat, Mom went to fetch an staff member and we went through the adoption process. And that's how I ended up with Hendrix!