The Lenin Sisters

Many years ago we were adopted by a cat we named Smoke.  She was a light torty, a light tortoiseshell.  She and Charlie really connected.  She was his little pal and he was her adored human.  Smoke got pregnant, very pregnant, when we lived over on Narragansett, behind BC's.  One day, BC & Charlie's parents were returning from a trip to China,  visiting with them up at BC's place upstairs.  I was not, I was sick and didn't feel like spreading it around.  But suddenly I noticed Smoke walking on the neighbor's wall and not pregnant at all.  The blessed moment had come.

I went up to BC's lath house where we had built a kitty nest for Smoke to have her babies, and there they were, four tiny adorable kittens:  a white one, a black one, a gray one, and a tortoiseshell.  They grew as kittens do and rather than have them live on a shelf several feet above the bricks we decided to get a cardboard box for them to spend their kittenhoods in.  (Its now OK to end sentences with prepositions, I have found!)  So down to OB to find a nice cardboard box.  And voila, there, in an alley behind Lownes Dept. Store, was one labeled "Lenins".  They probably meant Linnens but misspelled it.  So the girls became The Lenin Sisters.  Only one of them was not a girl.  The white one, the most feminine and dainty and shy of all turned out to be a boy.  We found homes for the black one and the white one and kept the gray one and the tortoiseshell.  They turned out to get named:  The Gray One and Torts.

Great cats.  Seriously great.  The Gray One was my little baby, I'd carry her upside down everywhere and she basked in it, she loved it.  Torts was always a bit weird.  Tortoiseshells are.  I asked a friend who's a biologist about why cat personalities so often relate with their fur, he said that in the womb the brain and the fur cleave off from the same stem cell mass.  Interesting.

Some nicknames

Charles
Charlie
Lucky
college friends at Stanford in Germany called him Tunie
Lukka
Luckums; Luquums
Chuppie
Chuplie
Chuppers
one person who became an ex friend rather fast called him Chumpley
Our new age names were Beauty and Glory but we could never remember who was who


Lucky McKain, Lucky McKain
shriek it out loudly again and again
He'll rent you a tacky little box
they all look just the same
thats why they call him Lucky
Lucky McKain

He had a gentle, sweet sense of humor, he accepted this nonsense, laughed about it.

I said it before, one of the best memories, from my step sister sleeping over here one night, awoke to us coming home singing and laughing.  That pretty much says it all.

I surfed.  He loved basketball.  Played on as many as four leagues a week.  Always stressed defense.  Played on the San Diego gay team at the Sydney gay olympics in 2002.  I was watching him play one night at the muni, a pass came right to him and bounced off his chest, one of the first signs that something was wrong.  In the on line gay basketball newsletter one writer wrote that Charlie was basically responsible for his team's loss, how very much that hurt him.  He was going down and didn't recognize it.  One night he came home from the Coronado league totally shaken, a player had died right on the court, a 35 year old in splendid shape, good looking, healthy, and wham, he was gone.  Charlie & I partied with his basketball buddies, I have seldom been around so many tall people in my life, quite a few of them major jocks.  The rap that gays are pussy boys is BS, these guys could camp it up then charge down the court & slam dunk.  And I was an above average surfer, a solid B+, maybe even an A.