My best friend's Siamese kitty just went over the Rainbow Bridge. I did not know her well--because she wanted it that way.

My friend, Patzilla, just had to put down one of her beloved feline soulmates. Nik-Nik was a gorgeous but totally crazed female Siamese. The members of the wedge-head Siamese Fancy among you will now mutter, “and what else is new?”’

She was wildly jealous of her Mommy. If I came to have a cup of tea, Nik-Nik would slink under the kitchen table, eyes and nostrils flaring, and begin one of those Oriental growls that ends in a pink-mouthed toothy scream.

“Yo, Bitch!!! Don’t you dare!!!”

The late lamented was indeed a most beautiful cat, with those long chocolate evening gloves they wear. She was also, to the naked, untrained human eye a psycho kitty. Nik-Nik died, quite suddenly, of a brain lesion, which may have accounted for some of her more bizarre (even by cat standards) behavior. She stalked things that weren’t there, although that is not unusual with cats. However, she became violently sick–and violently violent--when taken to a new modular home that had too many modern chemicals inside. Her owners, being good owners, were not able to keep her there.

It is a time of black veil mourning now that Nik-Nik has returned to the womb of Bastet, even though I confess I did not know the deceased well. Sometimes, when I visited she’d take a couple of steps forward with that characteristic Siamese tail whip that is guy-with-a-chain-saw-movie scary. I would respond with a couple of slow, prudent steps backward, while paying her soft, florid, baby-talk compliments. I always took her seriously, and did not want those razor claws embedded in my face.

Finally, Nik-Nik would accept that I was sufficiently respectful, and that I was going to chat with her Mommy. All while Patzilla and I were having the ceremonial cup of tea that cat lovers are required to share, Nik-Nik would huddle beneath a bench, from which vantage point she would glare with eyes that flashed a neon change back and forth from cerulean into livid pink. Hell’s kitty!

She was a chocolate point, and moved with the grace and pride of the Goddess Bastet strolling the pigeon-filled limestone plaza of her massive shrine in Bubastis. Nik-Nik’s fur must have been heaven to touch, (just like in the song,) but no one other than Mommy and Daddy knew this. Her ashes will be combined with those of Swartze, Simon and Pandora who are already stored in a mantel vase. Eventually, they will be commingled with Mommy’s ashes, and all of them delivered down to the sea.