the beautiful tragedy of aurelia amelia, part 1

In the summer of the year 2000, I lived in southwest Baltimore, in a no-bedroom efficiency loft apartment which was pretty huge. I had two roommates; we divided up the house with sheets and stuff. We were punk.
Now, southwest Baltimore (sowebo) is fucking ghetto. I'm not talking ghetto like cutesy ghetto, I mean broken glass, empty strollers and used condoms and needles in the alley ghetto. I'm talking if you're white and you live there, cops follow in their cars while you're walking home, because they don't believe you live there and they assume you're buying drugs. I once held up my key to a cop who did this, and then put it in the front door and entered my apartment...and slammed the door. Slamming your door on a cop is so satisfying...but I digress.
This is the setting for a tragic tale. A story of one beautiful animal whose determination and strong will knew no bounds. She was the greatest mother I have ever known, with the possible exception of my own (yes, you're dealing with rhymes now).
That summer I lived with two punks, Ricky and Jason. Ricky had mentioned seeing some cats living in the back yard, but I hadn't noticed them, and he was always stoned anyway, so I didn't really care. Then, one steamy, fateful day in late summer, September I think, I was washing dishes. There was a window directly in front of the kitchen sink. The strange layout of this apartment resulted in a deck/landing dividing this window in half, so that if one looked out of it, they would see, through the top half, the feet of someone standing on the upstairs landing. Through the bottom half, they would see the stairs leading down to the postage stamp-sized back yard. These steps provided the legally required fire escape, and also allowed any potential ill-doer easy access to my home. But in sowebo, few would break in, because few had any more than any other...the beauty of the ghetto. More digression!
So, as I washed dishes, I was distracted by a noise. The sound was sort of like a meow, but gravelly and howl-like. Like Tom Waits meowing. I stopped washing and looked up. There in the window, on the upstairs landing, was a desperate, forlorn, soggy creature pleading for help. It was a cat, matted from recent rain, with a look in its eyes which penetrated mine, a look which had me unconsciously turning off the water immediately and walking out my back door with no hesitation. My back door opened onto another small landing, which led to the steps to the back yard. She was already two thirds of the way down those steps when I walked out, and she turned to look at me again. I will never forget that look, so desperate and last-gasp. I started down the steps and she immediately went down into the back yard. I followed, and when I had reached the last step, she turned and made sure I was watching, then made another sound. This sound was a sort of gurgle, like a pigeon cooing. As soon as she made this sound, four kittens instantly appeared from the garage behind my house, and she laid down in the grass and began nursing them in front of me.
My heart stopped.
I realized I was dealing with something extraordinary, and I was now a part of it and there was no looking back. I felt a flood of emotions I had never expected to experience in relation to a small animal. I watched as this scrawny mom fed her babies, and understood more about the nature of life, motherhood, and human-animal interaction than I had ever even considered before. In a few short minutes, I had grown up a little.
And now I had a mission.