Good Kitties
Uncle Andrew
Look, it’s not really my intention to drive all of our friends and family away from our blog by constantly recounting the pain we endured with the recent loss of our last cat. After all, something along the lines of 55 million human-type people died last year of natural causes alone, and I’m sure at least a few of them were great folks, nearly as nice as our cats. 😉
We’re not sitting around poaching in our own bitter tears, honestly we’re not. And I truly hope that this isn’t getting just horrendously old to y’all. But something happened today that was so amusing and yet so heartbreaking that I just had to jot it down.
It all started at dinner. We decided to have tuna melts: you know, tuna salad on toasted bread with cheese melted over it. We haven’t had tuna melts in—Christ, six months, maybe as long as a year?—so it seemed high time to have them again.
Only as Margaret was preparing the tuna salad, dumping the briny water from the last can into the sink, it suddenly struck us: no one came to investigate. We weren’t treated to the deafening thunder of tiny hooves on the linoleum. No one stropped our ankles, hitting us up for a shot of that good stuff. For the first time in over fifteen years there were no cats to interrupt our dinner preparations with demands that we share our piscean bounty. This made us both suddenly and terribly sad.
Then a wonderful idea struck me. I trundled downstairs and returned with a fresh can of tuna. I opened it up, but kept the lid on and the liquid inside. I then led Margaret out back to the rose arbor she had erected on the site where we had buried Scamper last year, planting a rose bush to mark his grave. There, giggling and crying and holding each other, we squeezed the tuna water out of the can and onto the ground underneath the rose arbor, tipping a six, as it were, to our family members who could not be with us that day.
Good kitties.
5 Responses to “Good Kitties”
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February 2nd, 2008 at 10:23 am
That has got to be one of the sweetest stories I’ve ever heard….it literally brought me to tears. The next time I open a can of tuna I will cherish the tapping little footsteps I hear running down the hall into the kitchen…thank you for reminding me of how lucky I am….and I am so sorry for your pain….
February 2nd, 2008 at 11:26 am
Hey Kellye! Thanks for your comment. Hope I didn’t short out your keyboard with tears. 🙂
I think if there’s one thing I would do different if we had it to do over again—and we will soon, I have no doubt of it—it would be to take more pictures of our cats, particularly during their kitten years. Just no excuse not to in this age of digital photography. We’ll always have our memories of Scamp and Scrum, but a few more photos wouldn’t have hurt.
February 2nd, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Dear A and M…What I wantto know is what i the strange picture above your bog. It lookks for all the world like a “spirit” picture of the type tthat mediums use , in this case a spirit kitty. I do not think you are playing games, and maybe it is our computer that is weierrding out, but Daddid not see this when he accessed your blog. You realize that I will be opening cans of tuna and thinking of you guys and kitties in the future. Pkease be willing to explain this to my therapist if it becomes acompulsion 🙄 🙄 🙄 love MOM
February 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Mom,
Not sure what you are referring to there. We don’t have any picture on our site that I think matches the description you gave. But I’m only too happy to write a note to your doctor if necessary. 😉
February 4th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
The first time I opened a can of tuna after my 18yo kitty passed away, I bawled like a baby when I realized that there was no need for me to be so exaggeratedly careful walking around the kitchen since she wasn’t going to be underfoot begging for tuna. Even 10 months later, something similar will catch me out and I get sad all over again. I completely get where you’re coming from here.