Phantascene.com's Journal: In Memory of Harry Potter 2005

My cat, Harry, was hit by a car the other night out on the road and killed. :'( My brother found him and collected him for me so I would not have to see him. It completely breaks my heart to think that because of someone's careless driving on a small side road, that should not have any kind of speeding on it, I have lost my beautiful baby kitty. Harry Potter was such a wonderful cat who never showed any desire to get onto the kitchen counters - even when we left out turkey on them for hours on end at Thanksgiving. We left the butter on an open dish on the counter with Harry loose in the house and even when we were gone he never got up there and got into things. He was an amazing cat.

His favorite place was laying on my shoulder watching me work. He would lay there for hours, his weight balanced perfectly on the shoulder so that it was not uncomfortable at all to have him sleeping there. And he would sleep there, falling asleep with his head on my chest and his paws stretched out. I could walk all around the house with Harry laying draped over my shoulder.

He disliked human food, and would get annoyed if he did not have his favorite cat food. And should his dog (my mom's Shih Tzu) run out of food or water, Harry would come get me to refill the bowls for the dog.

I had placed a thermometer outside the window in 2006 and Harry would not go into the room for a very long time, then he had his hackles up growling at the thing.

When I had first got Harry he was afraid to leave my bedroom. After almost a year he got courageous enough to venture into the rest of the house, then later on that year he was ready to explore outside.... sort of. Harry was a very agoraphobic cat for the first two years of his life.

I suppose, looking back on that fear, it was probably some kind of foretelling that something like this was inevitable. I only wish that my brother's cats had not been hanging out on our porch encouraging Harry to get over that fear he had of the outdoors. :'( That is the trouble with cats, though. You can not keep them safe, can not keep them inside. Me and mom had talked about building a enclosure outside my window that Harry could go out into without getting hurt, but then we started letting him out for brief amounts of time because he wanted out with the other cats so badly...

I will miss him dearly.