Stripe

Good old Stripe lived about twice as long as any other cat we've ever had.

We originally got him when Kate was about seven years old. She wanted a cat of her own, and had her heart set on a tiger striped kitten. So set, in fact, that she already had the name selected before we even saw any cats. We found an ad in the Pennysaver and followed it to a house where the closest we could come to a striped cat was the completely stripeless creature that immediately decided that he wanted to go home with my daughter. Since Kate had an almost perfectly good name picked already, it seemed silly not to use it. So Stripe joined the family.

Stripe did the job we had asked him to do. He was a great cat for a kid, and although he gave nothing more than a raised eyebrow to the kind of hijinks that Pip is so notorious for--this cat wasn't jumping in the air for anyone, thank you very much--he was the perfect warm body at the foot of the bed, or in your lap, or cuddled up with the other cats in the family. As my mother used to say, he had charisma (and, simply put, Stripe always used to favor my mother's lap at every opportunity). Eventually it was Stripe and Pip at the household pets, and Pip quickly proved himself more fleet and more powerful, but he always acceded to Stripe as the dominant cat in the household. When they played together, it was Pip who allowed Stripe to win. It was, as everyone knew, including Pip, the right thing to do.

In his day Stripe looked like quite the bruiser, but he was more hair than brawn. Still, he scared the bezooties out of a couple of people who weren't expecting him. Near the end, he lost a lot of weight, and there wasn't much left of him. When he sat in my lap this Sunday while I was reading the newspaper, the tiniest wind could have blown him away. According to the vet, he seems to have had a stroke; his system pretty much just gave up working.

There will be other cats. Pip will adjust to being alone for awhile, and then there will be a kitten from somewhere to shake things up. But Stripe will be remembered. He had a special fondness for debaters who were allergic to cats, although how he could detect these allergies was a secret he kept to himself. While Pip was doing tricks and seeking to prove his wondercatness, Stripe was comfortably watching, sitting on someone's lap, preferably someone allergic, and enjoying the show with the rest of us.

One of the things that makes humans human is their desire to connect with other creatures. We bring pets into our houses and treat them like one of the family. And when one of them passes on, we're sad. But happy, too, to have enjoyed all that wonderful company, and that connecting to a life not our own, a life not even like our own. Stripe was, almost from the beginning, inevitably referred to as Good Old Stripe. The only thing he was missing? The one thing a seven-year-old didn't seem to care about after the initial introduction: stripes.