It's like this, Cat

This was going to be an insightful column about a recent federal court decision.\nI type my column every Thursday evening. Opinion columns that run Monday are due Friday, and I never have them done much ahead of schedule. \nIf I wrote my columns Tuesdays, you would be reading about Judge Royce Lamberth's decision, in which he held that the Department of the Interior had incompetently run a trust fund set up on behalf of Native Americans for nearly a century.\nActually, I'm not sure how long the trust fund ran. Maybe it was 40 years. Or 70. It's complicated. Troubling, but complicated. \nInstead of writing the column, let me sum it up for you: Federal government robs Indians again. \nGot it? Great. You might as well turn the page now and read somebody else's article because this isn't going to be a well-researched, documented and cogent analysis of important problems in public policy.\nI just got off the phone with my parents, who called to tell me terrible news.\nOf course, it wasn't my parents, plural, who told me the bad news. It was my father. My mother started to talk, but she couldn't get anything out after the word "cat."\nYes, my cat died. I'm writing a college newspaper column about my cat dying. I told you to turn the page paragraphs ago.\nMy cat didn't just "die," though. He was killed by our neighbors' dogs.\nBandit, we just called him "Cat," -- and I will follow that usage here -- was my second cat, and he wasn't nice. Fluffy, our nice cat, was run over by a car in 1986, around my fourth birthday. \nI only have a few memories of Fluffy, mainly just his funeral, but I guess he didn't mind that I pulled his tail too much, like 3- and 4-year-olds do. \nCat, on the other hand, enjoyed ripping my forearms into shreds. He bit. I don't mean play bites either. He was surly and mean and rude.\nSorry. This isn't "Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul."\nI have fond memories of Cat, but they are all mixed up with the bad ones. I felt about him the way Cole Porter felt about New York when he wrote that he happened to like New York, "the sights, the sounds/and even the stink of it."\nCat had six toes. Ernest Hemingway and George W. Bush both had cats with six toes. That is the only thing I have in common with Ernest Hemingway and George W. Bush.\nAnd he was my cat for 17 years.\nI hate columns where personal tragedies give writers insight into the "meaning of life," but now I understand the impulse.\nI am 21. I don't remember much before I was four. Cat was part of my life, then, for almost literally as long as I can remember.\nCat was there when I went to kindergarten, when I went to high school, when I graduated from high school. When I started college, my mother, who hated Cat, asked if I could take him with me. \nShe was joking. She knew IU wouldn't allow it.\nIf I had taken him with me, he would still be alive. Sick, old, but alive. \n2003 has not been a good year for my childhood. I wanted to be an astronaut. In February, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart on re-entry. Then Mr. Rogers died. And now …\nIt's a good thing I'm not an English or art major. I shudder to think about the bad art this trifecta would prompt me to create.\nI used to make fun of articles like this one. I thought they were cop-outs.\nI guess my childhood really is over. \nI hate growing up.