From Crisis to Cuddles: Yoshi's Story

Content note: This post describes the birth of kittens and a newborn kitten in medical distress. Yoshi is very much alive and is currently getting in the way of game prep as I write this. You are safe to read on.

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The convention season has a rhythm to it. There are the long drives and the badge pickups and the too-much-coffee mornings, the sessions that run long and the ones that end exactly when they should, the players you meet once and remember for years. And then there are the quiet stretches in between: the drive home with an empty back seat and a full brain, when the noise settles and something else surfaces.

This is one of those posts.

I want to tell you about Yoshi.

Not Yoshi the Director of Dice Acquisition, although she is absolutely running this company and we all know it. I want to tell you where she came from, because it is a story about showing up when things are hard, about doing the one thing in front of you when you cannot see past it, and about how a motto I had been carrying for years found its truest meaning on the floor of my wife’s converted office at the end of the longest day in recent memory.

But we have to go back first. Back to Lafayette Square, in the late summer of 2019.

The cat who lived in the alley

We were renting a house in Lafayette Square at the time. The woman in the carriage house behind us found a cat sheltering under a truck in the alley and, with no hesitation whatsoever, named her Alley. Between her and us and the neighbors, we started putting out food.

Alley was a stray with no particular interest in being domesticated. She would come around, eat, tolerate some affection, and disappear back into the neighborhood. She was not our cat. We had an old, mostly deaf cat at home, and we were not looking for another one.

You can see where this is going.

Summer turned into fall, and fall into winter. We kept feeding her. A neighbor put out a shelter. And then one evening in late December, there was a snowstorm, and Alley was sitting at the back door looking in.

One of my kids was visiting that day. They took one look at that cat sitting in the snow and deployed the kind of guilt that only an adult child can deliver with full precision.

“Mom, how can you leave her out there?”

Never underestimate what your kids can do to you, even after they are grown.

We let her in.

River

For about a month, Alley was in and out, not quite committed to the arrangement. We started calling her River, after River Tam from Firefly, who was also something of a stray and also not entirely sure where she belonged. By late January, she had made her decision. No more going outside. She was in, full time, and we took her to the vet.

My wife was convinced the cat was pregnant. The vet could not say for certain at that first visit, but the timeline would become very clear very quickly.

We left for a week’s vacation and came back to a very pregnant cat.

At that point, we started looking for homes for the kittens.

March 14, 2020

You know that date. Everyone knows that date.

The first full day of the US COVID lockdown. The day the earth stood still, or at least the day it lurched to a halt and held its breath.

River could not settle. She had been restless all day, and by that evening it was clear: the kittens were coming. We converted my wife’s office into a cattery. We gathered towels. We waited.

Five kittens arrived that night.

Yoshi was the third.

I want to pause here for a moment, because this part of the story deserves its own breath.

The world outside that office was in full collapse. The news was incomprehensible. The isolation was immediate and total. I do not think I fully understood, in those first weeks of lockdown, what was going to carry us through, but it turned out to be five kittens in a converted office, each one smaller than a deck of cards, all of them demanding food and warmth and attention at intervals that did not care what was happening on the television.

Raising them during that time was not a distraction from the difficulty. It was something more than that. It gave the days a shape. It gave us something to care for when everything felt out of reach. I genuinely do not know how I would have gotten through those months without them.

If you ever find yourself in a lockdown, I recommend five kittens. I recognize this is not practical advice.

one crisis at a time

When River delivered Yoshi, she began to do what mothers do: she started to lick her kitten. But Yoshi was not moving the way the other kittens had moved. River kept working, and I watched for a moment before I understood what I was seeing.

Yoshi was a breech birth. River was licking, but she was clearing the wrong end. The membrane was still covering Yoshi’s face.

I knelt down on the floor and cleared the sack from her mouth and nose. I picked up a towel and started stimulating her, rubbing gently, waiting.

After a few moments, she moved.

I placed her against River, and she started nursing.

I think that is the moment she became my cat.

And I think it is also the truest version of the motto I had been carrying for years, without fully knowing what it meant yet: one crisis at a time. Not the hope that things will go smoothly. Not the wish to avoid hard moments. Just the willingness to kneel down when it matters, handle the thing directly in front of you, and wait to see if it works.

That night had five crises, arriving in sequence. You handle the one in front of you. You do not look at the pile. Just this one.

The runt

Yoshi was the smallest of the five, and she held her own for the first few weeks. Then, around the seven-week mark, we started to notice things. Balance problems. Difficulty walking. Trouble with jumps. Something was not right.

We took her to the vet. The vet was not certain what we were looking at but started her on several medications to rule out infection. Because of her low weight, hand feeding was also recommended.

For the next two weeks, I was giving her medicine multiple times a day and feeding her a fortified mix of kitten food and kitten milk replacer. We also took her to a feline neurologist. I did not know that was a specialty that existed. It is.

The neurologist suspected possible hydrocephalus, a condition involving fluid accumulation in the brain, but Yoshi was too small for an MRI. We would have to wait and see.

We waited. We fed her. We drove to appointments. We did the thing in front of us.

She made it.

Yoshi still carries some of those early days with her. She is not as balanced or coordinated as a typical cat. She walks with her head tilted slightly to one side. She approaches jumps with more deliberation than grace. The most likely explanation, in the end, was simpler than hydrocephalus: she was the smallest kitten, was not getting enough from her mother, and needed extra help to get what her body required to develop. Once she got that help, she caught up.

She just needed someone to notice.

The weeks in between were not all worry. There was also this: five kittens growing, eyes opening, finding their feet, piling on top of each other in the way that newborn things do.

The goodbye that did not stick

We had been finding homes for the kittens since before they arrived. A family had chosen Yoshi early on, and they were good people. Their kids fell in love with her immediately. Because of everything she had been through, we kept her until sixteen weeks instead of the typical eight, to make sure she was stable enough for the transition.

Saying goodbye was hard. I kept a composed face about it.

I was not neutral.

A month later, the family called. Another cat in their household was not accepting Yoshi, and they were worried about her physical safety given the way she moved. They were heartbroken to bring her back. Their kids cried. They were good people doing the right thing, and it cost them something real.

The name she carries, Yoshi, is the name that family gave her. We kept it.

I maintained my composure when they returned her.

I was secretly overjoyed.

The Director

Yoshi runs this company. That is not entirely a bit.

She has been present for more game prep sessions than I can count, usually attempting to consume the dice or redistribute them to locations I cannot explain. She has earned the title Director of Dice Acquisition through sustained and deliberate effort, and she takes the role seriously.

But more than that, she is the reason the name makes sense to me.

one crisis at a time. That is not a clever phrase. It is a way of moving through hard things without being buried by them. It is the instruction that got Yoshi breathing on March 14, 2020, while the world outside was doing its level best to overwhelm everyone who lived in it. Handle the thing in front of you. Do not look at the pile. Just this one.

That is the philosophy behind this brand, and behind every table I run. Show up. Handle the crisis. See what survives.

Yoshi did.

Back to the table.