one of my favorite san francisco landmarks is the cat lady. if you’re ever union square you’ll see her – sometimes she sits at the corner of geary & stockton; otherwise it’s powell & post – she seems to be there, rain or shine, every day, altho she’s never there after about five o’ clock. i like to think this is because she has a home to go home to at night. somewhere shabby perhaps, & certainly over run with cats, but with someone to help her & cook her a warm meal. i don’t know that any of this is true – perhaps she goes to a shelter at night. at any rate, her name is caroline. she sits in a wheelchair on her designated street corner, & she’s covered in cats. her lap is a nest of blankets & warm sleepy kittens. on cold days she has one or two tucked down the front of her shirt. when they claw her she curses them out, which can be terribly disconcerting if you’re talking to her & don’t know she’s got kittens hidden down her top. there’s usually a big fat orange cat (we’re talking the hugest cat i’ve ever seen) who sits beside her wheelchair on the street, & sometimes an adult siamese as well. those two are her cats. the rest of the kittens are rescuees from the tenderloin. she gathers these babies, eyes still closed, under-nourished & mewling, & nurses them back to health. adopting one of caroline’s kittens isn’t like adopting a cat from the spca. caroline has very strict criteria for who gets to adopt her kitties.

she doesn’t look very old – maybe mid-fifties, but life has obviously been hard on her. she wears a pink knit hat over a pink polar fleece hat, & her chair is draped in blankets for tucking kitties under. a donation can sits unobtrusively on one arm of her chair; she never asks for handouts, but accepts what people give, spending most of it on cat food. she loves to talk about her cats: their names, their behaviors, habits & temperaments, where she rescued them & who’s going to adopt them.

here’s the part that breaks my heart. they took all her cats away. i don’t know who ‘they’ is – the spca, the central health department, the homeless shelter – it doesn’t really matter. i’m sure whoever did it was well-meaning, & perhaps had good reason. but a cat-lady with out her cats is like, well, there are a million cheesy analogies, but they all boil down to a cat-lady with out her cats is not right. someone made up a petition for her, & she gathered lots of signatures, but it did no good. the confiscated cats are up for adoption at the spca. undoubtedly they’ll get good homes, but not with caroline.