Goodbye Kitty

I did build a fort this weekend (see the post below), but I’m not in the mood yet to blog about it… Kitty (that’s what we called him) passed away on Friday night. Everyone says that their pet is the best (and they are all correct), but my cat truly was one of the best. I got him when I was around nine or ten years old when my dad finally gave in and got me a kitten on the premise that he would be an outside cat. That lasted for about two weeks… he quickly became an inside/outside cat. The nice part of that was that he didn’t use a litter box; he would just go when he was outside. He had the best of both worlds – he would go out during the day and hunt, then come in and take a nap on one of our laps. I remember worrying about “rodent breath” when I was a kid… I didn’t want to kiss him or hug him too closely if he had just eaten something (and left the guts on the doormat for me to clean up).

If you did the math earlier, that means he was 18 when he died. I know that’s old, but it was so sudden. He was fine on Friday afternoon… then my parents called to complain that “my cat” (he continued to live with them when I moved out) was throwing up at around 8:30. An hour and a half later, I got another call that his body had shut down and that he wasn’t going to make it. They took him to an emergency vet, but nothing could be done. We buried him by the lake on Saturday morning.

Here are some things that I want to remember about him:
- he would get a “red neck” after sticking his head in whole to look for a rodent
- he once brought a live bird into the house after catching it, then set it free
- he would “rake the blinds” with his paw to wake us up when he wanted to be fed or to go out
- he’s the hunter, but he slept through a snake being in the house when we were doing construction, it was the dog that noticed and barked
- he could always find the most inconvenient place to take a nap (whether it was on top of what you were reading, or on your pillow when you were sleeping)
- I named him Oreo when we got him, but the only time he was ever called that was at the vet