Lucky

Yeepun, her sister Mee and I found Lucky one night in May 2015, walking through our village at Phanu Garden in Bangkok. Two kittens were lying beside a garbage bin on the sidewalk, put out with the trash for the morning pickup. One was already dead. The other was barely alive.

We took him straight to the vet. He was small enough to fit in one hand and too weak to keep himself warm, so he spent his first days in an incubator in the clinic’s intensive care unit. Over the next few weeks they nursed him back to life, and he earned his name.

We never found out why the kittens were on the sidewalk or what had happened to them. Lucky recovered, but he has always had trouble with his balance, and I’ve long suspected he took a blow to the head before we found him. It has never slowed him down much.

By late 2016 he had grown into a lanky, pale-coated cat at the Chiang Rai kennel, with the same pointed face he had as a kitten, and the same slightly unsteady walk.