KITTY BOO

kitty boo

image courtesy of photobucket.com

His name was Kitty Boo… My mom has a colorful flair for names and nicknames. He was big, tough, mean, and ornery… but not all the time, sometimes he was shockingly gentle and loving. He was a tomcat, pure white with piercing blue eyes and deaf as a stump.

My friend Hazel at http://hazel-moon-blog.blogspot.com/ wrote a post about one of her childhood pets that was also a cat and my mind automatically eased back in time to one of our childhood pets – the toughest tomcat on the block; Kitty Boo.

Often when my mom let the monster sized tomcat in the house she’d break out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum the deafer than a door nail cat like a pillow. He loved it… I also recall the times my mom would doctor the big tom’s wounds from tangling with other toms and dogs.

I can’t remember the morning in detail, but I do recall it was a day out of the ordinary. Our fearless pet didn’t hear the vehicle that hit him… It was the first time I remember my mom crying… She loved that big ole’ tomcat. That difficult life lesson my mom used to teach me the value of life. She knew it was just a cat, but God granted her the heart for even the slightest of God’s creations.

Back in those days we did things the old fashioned way. My mom and I placed Kitty Boo’s body in an old box and duct taped it up, then drove to “The Bench” in the foothills above our house for the burial. My mom wept silently while I dug the grave with a small green portable US army shovel.

If  that tom cat was that important to my mom, he was that important to me… My tears poured out to match my mom’s into Kitty Boo’s grave as I dug it…

Funny how certain days from childhood stick out in vivid detail. For those of us fortunate enough to learn the realities of life in this small way, I think it begins to prepare us for the more difficult tasks in life we all must face. Death is as big a part of our lives as life itself… No one gets out alive. God’s gift of free will and the choice we make with it will determine where our soul will reside for eternity. We begin learning this lesson as children and if we’re fortunate enough, we graduate from carnival goldfish to pets, all the way up to our loved ones.

I’m not so sure if I’ll see Kitty Boo again on the other side or not, but I do know I’ll see my loved ones again. While not based on anything profoundly Biblical, but on eyewitness of the event, I think the first person I see will be my dad. I think he’ll be the one to escort me across the dimensional river home… I’m looking forward to that smile and those familiar words, “Hey son.”

And you never know, I might get to see that big ole’ tom cat my mom named Kitty Boo again…