A lovely tribute poster to an East Vancouver cat

This kills me…

We saw this this morning, coming home from Sunday branch. It just happened a few nights ago, on Thursday… I had no idea. I guess a cat named Willow got hit by a car near the intersection near my building and some people tried to help the critter.

What really gets me is the note of forgiveness at the end.

My own cats are going 17 years now; I’ll be lucky to squeeze three or four more years of life out of them, I guess. I can’t imagine how I’ll feel when they’re gone.

The other day I saw a guy buying tins of cat food at a nearby supermarket. We struck up a conversation about cats. “Cats not kids, that’s my mantra,” said the guy, who looked like he might be around my age (46), give or take a few years.

(Strangely, later that evening at the Mountain Goats show at the Rio Theatre one of the items for sale at the merch table was a slip mat that said “No Children”. It’s the name of one of the band’s songs and popular enough for people to have yelled out requests for it at the show.)

I don’t know what I’m getting at here, except maybe that if you don’t have kids then pets become the receptacles of all that otherwise-unused emotion. And R.I.P. Willow. My heart goes out to the grieving owner(s).