You Can't Always Get What You Want...

But Sometimes You Get What You Need?

From the time I was about 5, I looked forward to the day that I could adopt a grey kitten of my own that I would call Cassie. I don’t know what put this desire so strongly and specifically into my head, but I thought about it frequently. Each year I grew older, I knew I was a year closer to obtaining my Cassie. After I signed the lease on my first apartment, the first thing I did was go right down to the humane society. I scanned the dirty room full of cats until I focused in on one itty-bitty grey kitten that fit the image in my mind. As I started playing with her, I quickly found she wanted nothing to do with me. I kept picking her up and trying to get her attention, but she was really more interested in other things in the room.

At the same time, a slightly older kitten, a cream tabby that had already lost its early baby fur, was desperately trying to get my attention. She nuzzled me and rubbed my legs and kept crawling into my lap. I made one last attempt to make the grey kitten notice me, but she didn’t. “Okay” I said to the cream tabby. “I’ll think about it.” As I went to exit the room, the tabby followed me to the door. When I shut the door behind me, she jumped up into the window and had both paws and her little face pressed against the glass, watching me go and mewing.

My heart stopped. She was my Cassie. I went back and filled out the paperwork to take her home, and we have been inseparable ever since. I’ve never seen a cat more attached to somebody. When I go away on business, she howls at my husband as she looks for me. When I don’t feel well, she lays by my side. Whenever I leave the room, she follows. No, she’s not the grey kitten I visualized almost my entire life. She is better.

This may seem like a poor comparison, but my experience finding Cassie showed me that sometimes things are better when life chooses for us rather than the other way around. I wonder what life will choose for me on this journey, and I can only hope that it will be better than anything I could have imagined for myself.