Smokey
by Sarah

I only ever had one cat, and that was when I was a child, about 7 or 8.

My new gray kitten that I named Smokey had to live in the garage because my father was allergic to cats. Smokey was quite sweet and lovely, but he had one very bad habit, his fatal flaw, it turned out — he loved to curl up for a nap behind one of the rear tires of my mother's Mustang.

One day, only a few months after I got Smokey, my mother came to pick me up at school, on a day that was not her day to drive for the carpool. She came to tell me the sad news — she had forgotten to look behind the tires before she pulled out of the garage earlier that day. That was my first and last cat.

Since then I've only had dogs for pets, not because of the Smokey incident, but because I developed the same allergy my father has and within about five feet of a cat, I start itching madly and sneezing constantly. So, cats are out and dogs are in, but I do think people are lucky who have some of each that live happily together.