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Monday, February 16, 2009

Some Pets You Will Never Forget

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

We are still working on getting settled in. Pictures are gradually being posted on various walls (so they are no longer on the floor). I brought one of my cat Stripe from when I was a kid. Stripe was a brown tabby cat, and the odd cat in the litter (his three brothers and sister were all white without a trace of any other color, as was his mother). Somehow, Stripe became my cat for much of his life. The pictures of him in the frame were all take fairly late in his life, while I was away in the Army. All show him laying down and taking his ease. One is a close up of his head, where he was obviously disturbed from his nap so the picture could be taken. Another shows him curled up in a box, and again being "disturbed". The last two both show him spralled on the back of a recliner. One of these has him complete at his ease, obviously enjoying his nap.

I have had a lot of cats in my life, so many that I cannot remember all of their names or even what happened to them all. Stripe was not the first cat that was "mine", but he was one of the two longest lived. And he was (as cats go) extremely intelligent with a well developed "vocabulary" (he had specific "meows" for specific purposes, i.e., I am hungry, I am thirsty, I want out, I want in, I want attention, and others). He was well adjusted to going for rides in the car (liked to sprall in the back window and watch the scenery pass by), and liked going for walks around the neighborhood with his "human", as well as just wandering around on his own.

He was a good hunter, although truth to tell he hunted more for the (to a cat) joy of the hunt than anything else.

He never seemed to forget me, seemed to know who I was when I came home on leave (I have known cats that if they did not see you for a month, they treated you as a stranger, but Stripe while he would be wary around anyone completely "new" would always greet me as his own, not just by scent by by sight.

I wish everyone who ever had a cat could have had a cat like Stripe. He was exceptional (as far as cats go) in so many ways.

Stripe died while I was in the service, and now I cannot even visit his remains as the house where he lived out his last days belongs to a different family now, and is in Florida in any case.

He will always be my cat though.