(Note: This happened TWICE this year. Twice. Both times, a tiny kitten in the passenger fender of the Angry Grandpa Chrysler. Both times, I had to rip the car apart to save the feline. This better not happen in 2018! -Ed.)

It’s a running joke within the family: I am a cat magnet. No, not that other kind of magnet, a cat magnet. There is something about me that felines simply gravitate to. I don’t know what it could possibly be, but ever since I moved to Kentucky at the end of 2013, it seems that cats simply magick themselves into my life. And apparently, the trend has continued, because just a few hours before writing this, I turned into a magician and pulled a kitten from the fender of the Angry Grandpa Chrysler.

Here’s the track record: in April 2014, we found two days-old kittens, abandoned, at my mother-in-law’s house. We adopted them, bottle-fed them, raised them up. One year later, we found a kitten that had either been abused or attacked…she was disoriented, had a wound on the nape of her neck, and was scared to death. We adopted her in as well, after a little bit of hem-hawing on the subject. These are the three cats we own now, Challenger (gray), Dozer (orange) and Sunny (buff-colored, smaller.)

At that point, three cats became the mark…no more. But a month after Sunny appeared, on the way home from the Simpson County truck pulls, I found two emaciated, weeks-old kittens that had been put into a plastic bag and left on a rural highway in a thunderstorm. To be fair, it’s amazing either one of the Street Rescue kittens made it, but after a rehabilitation period and some growth, we sponsored their adoption and both cats found good homes.

For 2016, we didn’t find a cat per se, but one appeared at my in-laws’ house around fall and just wouldn’t disappear. The little guy was likeable and cuddly, and just wouldn’t bugger off, so they let him in the house when the temperatures started to drop. When the cat they had owned passed on suddenly, they adopted the little gray tabby and today, Leo is now a spoiled monster.

So there you have it…six cat rescues in three freaking years. That’s more than enough for any one person, right?

Wrong.

Here was today’s plan: when my wife got off of work we would go back into Bowling Green, hit up a cruise-in for some photos, hit up a home improvement store for some materials for our back deck project, and pick up some litter for our three furry housemates.

Here’s what really happened: we hit up the cruise. We went and picked up the litter. As we pulled into the parking lot of the pet store, Angry Grandpa made a funny noise, a new kind of squeak that neither one of us had ever heard before. We chalked it up to a random incident, and I bought the litter. From there, it’s a quick drive to the home improvement store, so we’d just be crossing a street, turning left, and turning right. I crossed the street and turned left at the light…and all of a sudden my right front fender started to meow very loudly. My sun-roasted brain didn’t compute at first, but my wife sure got the clue: “Holy shit, that’s a cat. Bryan, there’s a cat stuck in the car.”

You see these stories pop up every now and then. Just a few nights ago, I watched one about a woman who found a kitten stuck above the fuel tank of her Buick Enclave while driving around. At no point did I figure on this kind of thing hitting home…to give you perspective, our two bigger cats are in the 25-pound range and Sunny, while light, isn’t a small creature herself. We aren’t going to lose a cat anytime soon. But the Chrysler had been running for quite some time, it’s a hot day, and there is a scared kitten in the car. Crap. We turned onto the access road to the home improvement store, pulled over and shut the Chrysler down. The hood went up and I started tearing out some of the plastic trim pieces, trying to figure out where the now-silent furball was actually at. I had money that the cat had managed to wind up in the front bumper cap. I was wrong.

Upon removal of the weatherstripping trim that joins the lower section of the windshield cover to the front fender, I was greeted with a furry snout, whiskers, and two wide eyes that conveyed pure, unadulterated panic. The cat was in the rear area of the front fender, and as of writing I’m still not 100% sure how it got there. So how do you remove cat without removing fender? The Chrysler’s fenderwells can be popped loose, and that’s what a passing motorist helped do. He freed up a couple of plastic rivets and the next thing you know an orange-and-white fur missile is running for dear life, with one non-running human in hot pursuit and a total stranger trying to act as a blocker. After a good 120-yard top-speed spring, the cat was cornered under a decorative bush and scooped up.

The kitten has been treated well since his eviction from our car. We got the overheated creature into the air conditioned car to cool off, got him fed, and as I type the little beast is resting in a carrier. Unfortunately, we are still at our limit for felines, so once I give the cat a bath in the morning (and lose skin in the process, guaranteed) the little creamsicle kitty will be headed to the local shelter to be sponsored for adoption.

And here’s the second one…