Junior was, as far as cats go, kind of an asshole. He hissed at me every time he saw me. He wouldn’t let me near him. If I tried to touch him, he’d try to swat me, claws out. He was terribly ungrateful even when I cracked open a cat of wet food for him.
Still, he was a cat.
Like the cat in February, he was hit by a car. Like that cat, I sat with him as he died. Unlike that cat, it was mercifully brief. And then I buried him in my back yard as he thunder started rolling in.
He was not *my* cat, he lived free in the world. But he is why *my* cats will, so long as I have anything to say about it, live safely indoors, for a long, long time.
Junior was the last of the outside cats around here. There was a time when my house was the center of attention for a *lot* of cats, always litters of kittens showing up. But now those days are done, and the world is a little less for it.