Diseased Kittens, Small Thieves, And General Change of Pace

Time to stop making my posts so painstakingly SERIOUS.

I think I lost touch with being able to present things to people back home as anything other than painfully-wrenched descriptions of things that don't ever actually satisfy me or do justic to them. Time to let go of that, and thanks for bearing with me through the muckier ones. Maybe time to save this blog from becoming a bog.

A little kid came over with a cute, very very cute, little kitten in Fez. This kid couldn't have been one loose tooth over eight and a half, the kitten looked to have about five weeks of life experience, and no loose teeth as far as I could tell. It was a freaking cute one. Little boy is playing with her, putting her on his head, scooping her up, flipping her around, things normal little kids do with really cute kittens. On second though, the cat looked actually kind of sick in a cute way--goopy eyes, irregular fur tufts sticking out. I pulled out my camera, imagining how genius it would be, this rare documentation of Moroccan street kid and cute maybe-hepatitis-ridden kitten. I snap some. Kid wedges himself between me and Jess, puts little diseased kitten on my lap, smiles at me little kitten-playing Moroccan kid smile and eventually he wanders off and I go back to whatever I was doing before, which was soaking up the sun because I am in Morocco and it is very, very, gloriously, sunny.

I look over at our Moroccan friend Taha. He is soaking similarly. I think, hey what a genius picture it will be, my Moroccan friend so luxuriously soaking in the sun like me, with all that Moroccan stuff in the background, you know, mosques and really old falling-down city walls. I put my hand down to retrieve camera.
It is not there.

Camera is not there. It is not in my bag, it is not on the ground where I put it. I know where it is. It is in the hands of a guy who is going to sell it in a nice-looking little boutique, who got it from a guy who was selling it off a semi-legitimate main alley electronics rug, who got it from a guy who had it in a sketchy backalley cardboard box, who got it from a certain little kid we know in exchange for 5 dirham and a piece of crappy Moroccan candy. It has been about 11 minutes since the kid disappeared, but Taha confirms that this is probably where my camera is. He goes off to question some local kids who have been watching us, but they pretend cute little kid innocence and we know it is by now too late, and the camera has changed hands about 756 more times. Ah, well.

What really got me is this. A little while passes, and I notice a familiar-looking kitten, not far away, sitting under an old guy who's smoking a cigarette, looking very cute, still kind of diseased, and very confused. You'd think the kid could at least have the consideration to use the same cat over and over. A horrible thing to do to a poor little kitten. But then again maybe it was saved from a lifetime of crime, only to be a one-time offender. That is if you could even call it guilty, poor little cute sick thing.