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I remember my late dad telling me stories about his cat Smokey.

My dad was walking from work to the bus stop one evening and past by a pet shop window when he saw this sweet little, sad and lonely looking grey kitten in the window and it was love at first sight – evidently for them both. He named him Smokey because of his smokey color.

He bought Smokey for three dollars which back then was no small amount and he put him inside his jacket before boarding the bus. Smokey meowed quite loudly but since the bus driver knew and was friends with my dad, he ignored it. When some old biddy went to the driver to complain that someone had a cat on the bus because she heard it, the bus driver told her, “I don’t hear anything, you must be hearing things.” : )

My dad’s mother did not only, not like cats at all; she also didn’t think animals of any kind should be allowed in the house. But my dad who, having dropped out of HS to go to work full time to help support the family (this was during the Great Depression), convinced her that Smokey would be a good “mouser”, wouldn’t eat all that much and that he would set up a place for him in the basement to sleep at night and that he would not bring him into the house. But he told me he often would go retrieve Smokey from the basement after his mom and dad went to bed and brought him into his bedroom. He told me that he and Smokey would snuggle up together and Smokey would snuggle up close to him and purr and purr as my dad stayed up late to read his favorite books and magazines or listen to baseball games on the radio.

Smokey grew up to be a very, very big cat. And Smokey grew up mostly an outside cat when he wasn’t sleeping in my father’s bed so he was a rough and tumble cat, no mere house kitty.

Smokey used to walk with my father to the bus stop every morning, no matter the time or the weather; rain, cold, snow, sleet, it didn’t matter, and then would go about his business keeping their house and his neighborhood safe from vermin. But when my father got off the bus at night, there was Smokey, always there, sitting patiently, waiting for him to get off the bus, even in the cold or pouring rain and he would accompany my dad all the way on their nearly mile walk home. The bus driver would often wave to Smokey and sometimes would give my dad treats to give him.

One evening on their walk home, they passed by a neighbor’s house where a particularly very mean, very aggressive and quite big German Sheppard lived. Most of the time, when they passed by this house, this German Sheppard would bark and growl and snarl at them from the inside of the fenced yard, but Smokey pretty much ignored the dog or would if he might be bothered to , would briefly stop to hiss and growl back at him. But on that one evening, this dog got out of an unlatched gate and came charging after my father, snarling and with bared teeth.

Smokey got between my father and this dog and stood his ground and then proceeded to put a real beat down on him, bloodied this big bad dog up pretty good and to the point the dog ran back into his yard whimpering. The next time and every time after that, when they walked passed this house, the dog would run to the back of the yard and cower in the corner when he saw my dad and Smokey walking up the side walk.

A year later my dad was drafted into the Army on the outset of WWII. My dad made his mom promise that she would look after Smokey until he got home.

When my dad did come home, he got off the bus hoping that perhaps Smokey might be there waiting for him. But there was no Smokey. When he got home, he looked for Smokey but he was nowhere to be found. Then he asked his mother where he was and she finally broke down and told him that for several months after he left for the Army, Smokey had continued to make the walk to the bus stop every morning like clockwork and then waited for him at the bus stop every evening until the last bus came and that one night, during his walk back home, he was hit by a car and killed.

My dad, who had served in the South Pacific in an infantry unit and had seen over three years of heavy combat and the very worst of what war is and had lost many friends and comrades in arms, when he learned what had happened to Smokey, he told me that he broke down and cried like a baby.

My dad had a soft spot for all animals and we had both dogs and cats as I was growing up but my dad had a particular soft spot for cats. He once told me; “Dogs are pack and social animals by nature, and being that they have to belong to a pack to survive, they love you and accept you because it is in their very nature to do so. Cats on the other hand are mostly solitary creatures; they are not hard wired to love and accept you or depend on you and they can live quite fine without you. If a dog loves you, he does so because it’s because he has to, it is in his nature. But if a cat loves you, it is because he wants to and chooses to and he is going against his nature to do so”.