This is the best picture I have of Fargo, the kitten I adopted this summer. He's sitting on a small table I have between my bed and the window in my bedroom, staring at something I'm waving around while I take the picture. A moment later he pounced on it and I didn't take another image.

As near as I can remember, he was born June 30, 1997, and is incredibly small. I haven't weighed him, but he cannot weigh more than three or four pounds. He doesn't run -- he bounds everywhere. Often when he's running down the apartment looking for me, he makes a a series of little squeaks -- not quite a proper "meow" but enough so that I know he's looking for me. I suppose I'm the mothership now.

Until a few weeks ago his tail was tiny and sort of shaped like a tall cone. A real kitten-tail. Somehow it often finds my ears or nose while sleeps next to me at night. He purrs loudly and long in my ear.

Fargo is fearless, and has to be. He often falls off the counter in the kitchen, has fallen into the toilet from the top of the tank (I actually had to rescue him because he couldn't hop out of the bowl, but he was younger then), and often requires three or four leaps before he can get onto the bed without clawing his way up, a habit I've told him is not to be cultivated.

I'd like to have seen the other kittens in his litter. I think he misses them, and his mother. I am a poor substitute for that.

Update: Fargo has gotten much larger since this picture was taken, but he's still a kitten at heart. He's a pretty good cat to have around.