mungo's mewsings
Separated At Birth?
"Mungo! Quick! Come see!," my mom yelled excitedly one day from the living room. I was in
the kitchen,
eating most likely. I trotted over. She was reading the Daily News! It must have been
purchased by my
dad, because, even tho she loves Mutts, she'd never spend the 60 cents on the News...
Anyway,
she was pointing at a picture of a woman holding a cat. "Look! It looks like you!" I squinted
for a little
while at the blurry grey newsprint. It was a cat that looked just like me! I then recognized it as
my now all-
grown-up littermate, Lewis. "What does it say?" "It says his name is Elliot and his mother is a filmmaker. She had to call in the kitty
psychiatrist!" This 
amused my mother to no end.
"But his name is Lewis!"
"Mungo," my mom explained gently, "cats get new names when the get adopted. Like, your name wasn't Mungo..."
"Yes it was!"
"No, I named you Mungo."
"No, you named me Po. And then you named me Wrigley."
"And then I named you Mungo!"
"No! Then I told you my name was Mungo and you finally listened!"
"Oh, c'mon, that's insane. Who named you Mungo before I did?"
"My cat mom! You see, we were her second litter, so she already knew that we would be gone inside of 6-8 weeks, off exploring the world. So she named us after great explorers... Lewis, Clark, Mungo and Park. Mungo Park being only one, but she ran out of names she liked..."
"Didn't you have any sisters? I thought you had sisters..."
"She named my three sisters Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria--Maria for short..."
"Oh, I see." I think at this point my mother was humoring me. "So, this is Lewis?"
"Yeah! We should have him up! For a visit!"
"That'd be fun," my mom agreed, "but I bet his mother has an unlisted phone number."
I pawed at the picture of Lewis/Elliot. "True...He's a little tubby, isn't he?"
"Lewis is a big boy, my little Mungo."
Then a dove came to sit in the feeder and I got distracted.