Sunday, June 22, 2008

So long Old buddy

We lost a family member on Friday.
Our cat Milo, a member of our family for 14 years, was killed by a stupid person driving a stupid car, who failed to stop and remove the animal he or she had killed from the road. In Australia you are supposed to do that, and who ever hit him should have noticed, Milo was not a small cat, at 7+ kg he was in the upper echelon of size for cats.
But enough on that, we buried him shortly after discovering he was dead, due to what has happened to other animals we had lost. I broke down about fifteen minutes after the burial, in my room, I was not in a good shape for the rest of the night. I drew that picture of the old guy from a photo I had taken of him, it was a practice he routinely did, where he sat outside a door and surveyed the yard, a yard he had defended from other cats diligently for something close to 12 years. He bore many scars across his face, and had only recently lost part of his ear in another fight he got into.
He had also gone deaf, as I discovered when I was able to walk up behind him, while not being the least bit quiet and scare him. He always showed up around 4 to 6 pm for food. He occasionally interacted with our two kittens, who were quite simply in awe of this giant cat, to them at least, what with Monty being about 3.5kg, and Jazz being 2.2kg. He was also a friend of our dog Sally, though he was never fond of her way of showing affection, being licked in the face.
He also had a way of showing up when I needed a friend the most, when I was feeling especially down, or angry about something, he'd pop in and sit beside me.
Milo has been a constant in my life for more then 14 years, I have no friend who can say the same(seeing as most of my current friends were made in secondary college)
I've always been proud of this tiger of a house cat, who proudly stalked his way across his domain(our yard) uncontested, till we let Sally out of course.
He always has been an independent cat, disappearing especially in his youth for up to a couple of weeks, but as he got older he spent most of his time in our yard, sleeping in a bush somewhere, as the snake man discovered while hunting around for the snake that killed Sandro.
He even was able to say my sister's name at one point, which was possibly the weirdest thing I have ever heard.
Milo was the last remnant of my life in Mildura, all my friends I made there I've long forgotten, except for Milo. I wish a car hadn't ended his life, he could've easily lived for four or more years.
Milo was named for the film Milo and Otus, him being fairly similar in appearance to Milo the cat from that film(though our Milo was a much bigger cat). And he had a twin brother, who we named Scruffy, who was stolen from us while we lived in Mildura, by someone down the street from us.
In his youth Milo was an aggressive cat, but as he got older, he mellowed out and became a nice old cat.
I'm gonna miss the old guy.
Sayonara folks

2 comments:

tendafoot said...

Sorry for your loss. Milo was a great cat.

Eledor said...

He was, we were all kinda in awe of him(meaning family)he even survived several snakes going through our yard.