With Great Sadness I Report. . .

Boo Boo is dead. And I am crushed.



Boo Boo was a wedding present from my ex-wife who was a cat hater and just couldn't fathom living with a cat in the house, but she sacrificed for me, for my happiness, because she knew I was a cat guy.

When Boo arrived, he was about 12 pounds of whoopass crammed into 3/4's of a pound of kitten. As a kitten he was a vicious, snarling creature, full of piss and vinegar at the ripe old age of 8 weeks and there were times when I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to dominate this seething, hissing, razor-blade of a cat. For the first months we couldn't even have him in the bed with us because everytime you twitched, he would lunge at the moving body part and gouge us with either claw or tooth.



At about 4 months old, he bit me so hard that I nearly knocked his head off and it didn't faze him one bit. He only arched his back even more, flared his tail and growled loudly in an extremely menacing tone and flew at me as if to kill. Had he not been two pounds in weight, he might have succeeded.

However, as he aged, his feral attributes subsided, but never fully went away. He was always wild, but he had an emotional complexity rarely seen in cats. The only cat I've ever seen that openly displayed jealousy.



Born on the hardscrabble streets of a tiny beach town in Central America, he had traveled back and forth from there to the USA with me more than most human beings. A worldly kitty, he proved his masculinity while living there in the form of moving into our friend's hotel while we demolished and expanded parts of ours. My guess is he couldn't take the noise.

It was a tough battle for him in his new digs, but after whipping four other cats including the fearsome Papa G, he was eventually accepted, begrudgingly I'm sure, by the other cats. He never came back to our hotel. Once in a blue moon he would mount the stairs, make a pass through the kitchen to see me, creep through the dining room and leave. If I wanted to visit with him, I had to walk down the block to find him lounging under one of the tables in the competing hotel's restaurant.


Boo was even famous for a spell, when our competitor published an advertisement in a surfing magazine. The photo they submitted was taken by a friend and frequent guest of their hotel. It was a photograph of the hotel, at night, lit by the garden lights and the pool glistening in the foreground. A very nice composition to be honest. The photo was given to the owners via email and they never enlarged it to take a really good look and simply forwarded it to the advertising department of the magazine. Little did they know that the thumbnail photo, once enlarged, clearly showed Boo Boo lapping up a cool drink of chlorinated pool water at one end of the pool. It was the talk of the town for a while.

Sometimes, after a busy dinner service, I used to wander down the path across from the hotel to the beach with Boo and several of the other beach cats to relax a bit. We would sit on a big piece of driftwood and listen to the ocean, watch the stars, or gaze across the way at the lights of the next beach community. The cats would constantly stalk one another seeing who could launch the best all-out kitty assault! Man, what great times.




He was such a fun cat at times. Early in the mornings, I would normally find him at the foot of the bed, sprawled out in some odd contortion and I would pet him a little, he would bite me a little. I would shower and like many times before he would prepare his ambush. Most mornings I expected it. About a week ago I didn't. He camouflaged himself so well that I walked past him twice without ever seeing him. I had been traveling a few days earlier and had left a black duffle-ish bag on the floor, lazily I must admit. Well, he had climbed inside, blending in with the darkness. When I passed the third time, he ejected himself in a flying dropkick fashion, kicked me in the ass and bolted under the bed in all of about half a second. A regular ninja.

Boo Boo I am sorry and it is with a tear in my eye that I tell you and the world that I've learned from you the tenuousness of life, to appreciate the one I have, and the lives around me. Te extrano mucho mi gatito.