Little Kitty was a boy and part of a small litter born to a neighborhood stray cat that I called "Blackie" in May 2010. His mother, Blackie, was feral but I fed her because she was pregnant and I didn't want to jeopardize the health of her unborn kittens. I believe Blackie had the kittens in the courtyard of an unsold vacant townhouse three townhouses from me and she eventually brought her kittens down to our townhouse where they hid under my aunt's old Honda in our driveway.

I didn't want a bunch of strays hanging around so when I hosed our sidewalks and driveway to keep control of the fallen leaves, I would spray under the car to discourage them from staying there. I saw one all black kitten running out a few times along with two multi-colored kittens. One time he ran right into the hose which was two inches off the ground and he tumbled end over end. I felt sorry for him but he continued to run after righting himself. Another time he ran up my neighbors' horizontal roof gutter drain pipe at the property dividing line. And then one time I was looking for him through an adjacent bush and I saw his beautiful eyes looking at me in fear and it was love at first sight. I reached into the bush to pull him out but he ran under the car and I couldn't reach him. Finally one day he ran out from under the car into a planter island in front of our home and he got stuck in some springeri ferns. I plucked him out and he hissed at me but I petted him as I held him and he never hissed at me again. I took him inside our enclosed courtyard and made a bed in a crate for him and I fed him canned cat food which he loved. He lived in our courtyard for several weeks and I petted him frequently and brought him into our home a few times. His mother "Blackie" came into the courtyard from time to time to visit him and it was delightful to watch him pounce on her as soon as she jumped to the ground from the hibiscus tree. He loved to pounce on her flipping tail as she laid there and let him have his fun.

It wasn't long before he learned to climb up our large hibiscus trees to get out of the courtyard with her to go on hunting trips. The first time he left us he was gone for over a day and I was heartbroken that despite all our good care he decided to leave with her. I searched the neighborhood for him in the late afternoon and no one walking their dogs had seen him and I thought he was gone for good. Lo and behold he returned the following day and was famished and meowing for food. We then decided to let him live inside our home, which made him our first indoor pet since our Siberian Husky in the 1970's through 1981. He demanded to be let out around 5:30 to 6 pm every evening and we let him out so he could run around in our large driveway area. He took great delight in running past me at high speed whenever I was out front working with the landscaping or washing our cars, trying to get me to chase him. He usually came back after an hour or two and I would go out looking for him calling his name to get him to come home if he was out longer than normal. Sometimes he didn't come home despite my efforts and I would go to bed frustrated that he wasn't safe inside our home. A couple of times he woke us up around 3 or 4am by meowing outside our upstairs bedroom and we let him in. He had climbed up to our balcony on a tall aluminum ladder that I had resting again our balcony railing from our lower patio 15 feet below. It was amazing that he was able to climb up that tall ladder because of his small size at the time.

One time he came home the next day and he had serious wounds on his backside above his tail and I took him the vet and they operated on him to drain the wound. Apparently he had tangled with one of the possums in our neighborhood and he had several deep bite and/or scratches on his back, close to his spinal cord. They had to shave his backside to work on his wounds and it took a long time for his coal black hair to come back in and it had a duller sheen to it than the rest of his coat. He recuperated fine though and I think he learned never to tangle with possums.

After that expensive episode we then decided to make him a full-time indoor cat and we wouldn't let him out at night despite all his meowing to go outside. After a few days he gave up and he stayed content inside though he did run out a few times but he let us pick him up and carry him back inside.

He loved running up and down our stairs at high speed and he was a great companion to me in the mornings when Karen and Donna were at work and late at night after they went to sleep. He would usually lie down in the PC desk office chair and take a nap while I worked on the laptop and occasionally get down and meow to let me know he was hungry. I would then feed him dry food in the downstairs bathroom and pet his backside while he ate and he would purr away, happy to be eating and get a pet job at the same time. He would also jump up on the back of my chair and style the hair on the back of my head by licking my hair in numerous locations, occasionally putting his right paw on my head to make it stay still. Karen thought it was disgusting for me to let him do that but his sandpaper tongue on my scalp felt good and I wash my hair every day before I go out in public.

Little Kitty loved being clean and he spent a lot of his spare time grooming himself and sometimes he would have a small patch of missing hair from excessive licking. I never saw a flea or tick on him and I looked fairly frequently but the once a month prescription drug ointment really works. Whenever we had to board him at the vet's clinic due to out of town trips we always had him bathed and he smelled so fresh and clean when we brought him home. I never attempted to bathe him so I missed out on the joys of that experience and so did he.

He loved to play with various toys that we bought him and he loved chasing a laser light that I would move across the floor and up different walls and on the ceiling. It didn't take long for him to discover that I was making the light appear with the laser pen. He would meow when he wanted me to shine the light for him to chase and it was always a comedy to watch him in pursuit of the laser pinpoint of light.

Usually around 2:30am every morning he would get impatient and want to go upstairs to bed. Sometimes he would get tired of waiting for me at earlier times and he would make it a point to go flying up the stairs and he would sleep for a while before he came down to coax me to come up for bed. He would meow over and over again and paw me in my chair and I would usually agree with him that it was too late to be up and start to get ready to go upstairs. He would wait patiently while I shut the laptop down and turned off the TV and the lights. We would go to the downstairs bathroom one more time and he would eat a little and drink some water. I would then carry him up in my arms, stopping to make sure that the security pin was in our sliding glass doors and he would look up at the top of the door to see what I was doing. I would carry him upstairs and place him gently in an upholstered office chair that we have in our master bedroom and he would usually lie there purring while I petted him and patted his hind end. Sometimes he wanted to play by getting on his back and using his hind legs to scratch the underside of one of the chair's upholstered arms. He started this type of play when we first started letting him stay in the house and he would try to grab our hands and arms with his front paws or give us love bites when we would try to rub his soft belly. Occasionally he would jump up on our bed during the night and walk on top of us but he rarely laid down with us to sleep on the bed. He tried to bite my feet a few times through the comforter and sheet and I learned not to move them because they became a desirable target for him.

He was really adept in maneuvering around numerous picture frames on a shelf under our TV and he only knocked one down once or twice. He would go back there trying to get toys out from under the shelf that he had knocked under there while playing. Somehow he would maneuver over and around the numerous photo frames without bumping them and it was amazing to watch. But sometimes his feet would slip out from under him while running on the tile floor and going around corners and he would bump into walls and other objects and it was funny.

On Friday, September 30, 2011, Karen and I were in St. Louis at a convention and Donna called us to say that Little Kitty was meowing at something in the bedroom overlooking the courtyard. She went to investigate and she found a baby calico kitten in the bushes close to the sliding glass doors. She brought it inside and decided to adopt it. She and her fiance Jon put it in a box with its own litter box and food and water bowl and she started eating canned cat food immediately. We came home on October 2nd and fell in love with the baby kitten but we went out of our way to make sure that Little Kitty was loved too and he got more than the usual holding and petting and he was happy. He really enjoyed playing with the little kitten and sometimes he would get a little too rough and I would say "Be Nice" and he would cease his aggressive behavior immediately.

On Monday, October 10, 2011, Donna and I took Little Kitty and the new kitten to our veterinians at Mueller Animal Hospital in Hialeah. I've been going there since 1957 and although there are new owners we have always received professional services at reasonable prices on other outside cats that we have owned. Little Kitty was due for his annual feline leukemia vaccine and we wanted to get the new kitten checked out. I was carrying Little Kitty in his cage from the car to the vet when the cage fell apart and Little Kitty dropped to the ground from a foot or two up. It scared him and he ran into the tall bushes alongside the clinic wall and he was meowing in fear. Donna went inside to get help and a lady came out with her dog and stood where he had run through the bushes while I made my way through the bushes closer to his position. He got scared and made a run for it right at me and I luckily grabbed him and held onto him until we could get him into another cage inside the clinic. I held him like a baby and talked to him trying to calm him down and when they brought the other cage he went right inside. The vet examined him and said that he now weighed 11 pounds, down half a pound from August when we boarded him there for a long weekend out of town. The new kitty was also examined and things were fine with her and she was named "Cocoa" by Donna on the spot once the vet confirmed that she was a female.

We drove home and let Little Kitty out of the cage and he was glad to be home again. He played with Cocoa a little bit and he ate at least twice in the bathroom while I petted his backside and talked to him. He then went into the downstairs bedroom to take his usual afternoon nap, which he usually took upstairs in one of the bedrooms overlooking the lake.

At 5:15pm we heard two howls from Little Kitty and I thought he was talking to stray cats outside but Karen and Donna went in to check on him. They said he wasn't facing the outside courtyard, that he was lying down with his mouth open and appeared not to be breathing. I rushed in and felt him and he was not responding to me at all so I did chest compresses on him for a minute or two but nothing happened. I lifted him into a box and took him back to the veterinarians' clinic and he was examined within five minutes of our arrival by a male vet. I told him of the previous visit that day and that I wanted to know how he died. The vet was really nice and said that a full autopsy would be very expensive and he suggested that they do an x-ray of Little Kitty's body and then a selective inspection of his internal organs. He called me at home a couple of hours later and said that his x-ray was normal and that he inspected his kidneys, liver and pancreas and they were normal also. He said that Little Kitty's heart had a thick wall and that he was sending the heart to a lab for further analysis. He also said that the clinic's owner would call the manufacturer of the leukemia vaccine to see if they have had reports of other young cats after being vaccinated.

We only had "Little Kitty" for 17 months but he became an important and loving part of our family. We are heartbroken over his untimely death. I will miss him tremendously for the rest of my life. He greeted me every morning in the bathroom by running in and meowing at me as if to say "Good Morning!" and I would bend over and pet him and talk to him. He would then wait on me in the bedroom while I put on clothes and slippers and then race down the stairs with me. He'd wait while I turned on the lights, laptop and TV and then got a cup of coffee from the kitchen. I'd take a few sips and then he would go into the downstairs bathroom with me so I could give him his breakfast of dry cat food. Usually I'd pick him up and hold him in my arms and talk to him while he looked at the two of us in the mirror and then I'd flip him over on his back and I held him like a baby while I rubbed his belly and talked to him. He would usually love it even if I spent three or four minutes with him. Then I would turn him over and use two hands to lover him to the floor and then pat him with both hands on his hindquarters as he ran off. He really loved us and we really loved him because he was one fine damn beautiful loving kitten and young adult cat. Rest In Peace Little Kitty, we'll never forget you.

Don 10/11/11