Overheard (cows)

"My daughter told me she was thinking of becoming a vegetarian. I just about fell out of my chair.

"I'm like, 'Do you know what that means?'

"She says, 'Yeah, it means I don't eat cows.'"

Cat Hit by Car

I did not see the cat get run over. I turned around and there it was, lying in the middle of the road, kicking one hind leg. Then it lay still.

One of the people waiting at the bus stop with me walked out to take a look at it, and the person who ran it over actually stopped his car and came back to attend to it. But I am pretty sure it was dead. The young man carried it carefully to the side of the road. A small, thick bloodstain remained behind. Then the bus came and we had to leave.

Was it the same cat I have seen there before? It was orange and white, with a long fluffy tail. I think the other cat that lives around there is yellow. Well, one cat's luck ran out, all the same.

Death comes like that, suddenly, on a bright summer morning. So of course I had to dash off and write about it on my blog.

One of my cats got hit by a car once. He was not badly injured (comparatively), but it was still awful. His leg was broken, and he managed to get himself home. (I'm still not absolutely sure he was hit by a car. How could it have caused so little damage? But that's what the vet said.) Of course I felt guilty for letting him go outside, although I'm sure he enjoyed it, until the encounter with the car.

What really upset me, though, and haunted me, was the thought of his tiny body and all these big, hard, dangerous machines that move so fast and kill so easily. I don't blame the drivers. But looking at a road from a cat's point of view is truly terrifying.

There doesn't seem to be anything else to say.

"That Looks Like a Good Place!"

One of the strangest things I ever saw appeared in my window last fall. It was an apple.

There is an apple tree in front of my apartment building, and some oak trees out back. Perhaps because of this, there are always a large number of squirrels around. (We get gray squirrels around here. Occasionally I see a black squirrel -- Mirkwood-style.)

One cool autumn morning, I was wandering around the bedroom in my usual daze. I opened the window, and then left the room briefly. When I returned, there was something in the window.

These are the kind of windows that open vertically, with a crank (not the horizontal kind you push up). And while my back was turned, some squirrel or person unknown had placed an apple inside the window, right down in the corner.

I am not accustomed to things suddenly appearing out of nowhere, especially first thing in the morning. First there was no apple. Then there was an apple. I was amazed. Out of nothingness, something had been created.

I didn't really think it was a person. I had not noticed anyone walking by. It would be a pretty unusual thing for a person to do (I thought.) It would also be a pretty unusual thing for a squirrel to do. And yet.

I left the apple where it was for at least one day - maybe two, I can't remember now. Then I inspected it and saw many tiny toothmarks. Probability of squirrel upgraded to 99%. I finally had to move the apple. I put it on the windowsill for another couple days, but I'm afraid the squirrel didn't want it anymore.

That apple is long gone now. But it remains in my memory.