Last week my ten-year-old daughter and I dropped my son off at tae kwon do, and since we had time to kill and the weather was nice, we took a walk in the neighborhood behind the shopping center. At the end of the second block, a cat rushed straight up to us. We take a lot of walks together, and aside from one friendly cat in our neighborhood named Cobalt, the cats we see are usually pretty shy.
This orange-ish cat was anything but shy. She walked up to us like a cat on a mission (if a cat can be on a mission, of course). That mission, apparently, was to say hello. She let us pet her, rubbed against our legs, and was generally friendly. Upon discovering that the cat had no collar, my daughter asked if we could take her home with us. (Never mind the 1,500 other times I'd said no to getting a cat)
We gave this friendly cat lots of love, and as soon as we stood up to go on our way, she darted into the sewer drain along the side of the road. ("Why do cats always do that?" my daughter asked.)
We were almost back to the tae kwon do studio when my daughter decided that she was going to name the cat we'd met. After several minutes of brainstorming, she settled on Croissant.
Was she hungry at the time? Possibly. When I asked her to explain, she said, "Well, she's about the same color, and she sort of has those stripes..." Looking at the pictures now, "stripes" seems to be a loose interpretation of the cat's coloring, but sure, we'll go with that.
And that's the story of how a cat we met one evening came to be named, and shall forever be known to the two of us as, Croissant.
Comments