stuff on my cat

I don't mean to be deceiving, but I don't actually have a cat. The closest I have ever come was Willie, a neighborhood cat we adopted while I was in high school. I had always dreamed of having an animal sleep with me at night that would curl up next to me and keep my right calf warm at night. I tried letting Willie sleep with me, but every time I was about to slip off into dreamland, I would shift my feet ever so slightly, and BAM! Willie's un-declawed paws would be penetrating my sheets and de"feet"ing my feet. So out of my room he would go. Willie was an outdoor cat (as was proven by the neighborhood mockingbirds' unfounded loathing towards him and their subsequent dive bombing attempts at his rear end. You'd think he'd tried to harm one of their beloved family members..........), so he was comfortable in the outdoors.

I remember when I was a freshman in college, and we were getting ready to move out of our house, Dad and I were concerned about what was going to happen to Willie. As I mentioned before, Willie wasn't an indoor cat, and our neighborhood was his home, so moving him may not have been the best idea. Well, on one particular visit home from college for the weekend...or maybe it was a school break, I don't know, I remember Willie sitting at the front door in the middle of the night, his gaze going back and forth from me to the door, me back to the door. "Let me out, Becki. Please? I don't ask much." He never did that. He always stayed inside for the night with us, so I recall thinking that it was odd, but it was late and I wanted to go to bed, so I didn't dwell on it, and I let him out.

That was the last time I ever saw Willie. Dad and I both drove around the neighborhood looking for him, because he was always around somewhere. I remember a particularly rough night when I got really sad because my life was in a great period of change and I just wanted to hug my cat. I went driving around the neighboorhood looking everywhere I could think of looking for him. I never found him, and I think that maybe it was God's way of sparing us having to say goodbye. That might sound silly, but the way things happened was much easier than if we'd had to just leave him behind.

I loved Willie, even though he scratched me sometimes.

Anyway, all that to say, I found this website from my friend Sara's blog. It's funny.