What short moments we shared.

Before the sun pulled itself above the horizon on this very day, I stepped outside to the patio.

The lamentations of a feline called out into the morning hours with a sense of loneliness and lamentation, a frightened cry cast upon the cool air.

This new cat I had never seen before, his tortoiseshell coat calico in nature, a ginger tabby painted with black and white such that I knew he was sterile from the moment of birth.

And oh what a marvelous personality!  Loving, talkative, in need of human companionship, lost and alone.

Had he been cast out like so many others at White Rock Lake?  Or had he simply lost his way?

He spoke to me within seconds of seeing me, the voice of a predator who needs humans ringing in my ears as he wept his sorrow and pleaded his case.

I returned the attention, of course, gave him affection and food and water.

When finally the light of day spilled upon the world, I beheld his beauty as though I had never witnessed such majesty before.  A divine cat he was, a spectacle of nature painted with brushes diverse and artistic.

His personality likewise seemed made of nature’s best.

But he was declawed, at least in front, and he was sterilized, a need nature saw fit to address before he was born (male calicoes are genetically sterile, hence their rarity) and that his previous “owners” saw fit to endorse with cutting.

I spent quite some time with him over the course of hours.  He soaked up every minute of it, kissed me on the nose, gave me love bites, showed me the kind of attention one only finds in animals who love people.

And when I rushed out to run my errands and tend my chores?

I returned to find him dead, his body a castaway run over in the street outside my home, his ebullient persona left on cold concrete to mark the passing of a life too soon lost, an emotional being too wonderful to be misplaced.

I have seven cats.  What could I have done?

It only took an hour for me to witness the best and worst this one life might experience.

And I will never forgive myself…