I still grieve my cat Riley. The little feisty fart disappeared more than a year ago and there’s been no trace since then. He was almost nine years’ old at the time. Soon after, I received one phone call from a stranger who had read my sign describing his disappearance on a telephone pole up here in Golden Hill, my neighborhood. This guy’s phone number had a non-local area code, one I didn’t recognize. That seems to be getting more common these days. Sort of an example of globalization I guess. I appreciated his gesture, wherever he was from.
He thought he may have spied the rascal roaming in the thicket outside of the downtown San Diego post office one day. The old one, I’m sure you know it, a fairly big building, interesting architecturally, and across the street from the funky, totally outmoded central library—a library which I find personally embarrassing for such a big city. This is about ten or twelve blocks from the apartment where we lived, so I figured it was possible.
I drove down there with Ola who I’d been dating for a few months’. It’s such an unusual name—Ola, that is. She sat in the car while I looked in the bushes, if I recall. It was nice to have her moral support, but we didn’t have any luck, although there were several homeless people milling about out on the sidewalk who seemed friendly enough.
So ya, I miss him sometimes and this grief is mixed with definite guilt. True confession: I put a big dose of flea killing chemicals on him for the first time a day or two before he never returned home here. Perhaps I overdid it and overdosed him, although I’ll never know for sure what happened to Riley. I have to live with that.
At any rate, it wasn’t working out for the both of us. The place was small and he was very messy with the cat litter and way too aggressive. He bit me hard, scaring the crap out of me in the middle of the night when he would leap on my bed like a maniac, one too many times.
Good-bye dear crazy Riley. I did love you, so did Keighty.
Good-bye.
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