Tosca was born in San Pedro, CA, a small beach town just between Long Beach and Palos Verdes in the South Bay Los Angeles area. His mother was an alley cat that Samantha's sister fed fairly often-she eventually adopted her and has her to this day. He was the most beautiful of the litter, with sharply defined tiger stripes, and a rambunctious personality. He spent his first nine months in Samantha's San Pedro apartment, where he gleefully destroyed anything he could, and delighted in attacking the feet of Samantha and myself at 4 am, while we tried in vain to sleep. He just couldn't understand why we were sleeping at such a wonderful time of day.

Eventually this kind of behavior started to drive Sam nuts. So when I moved to Austin to attend UT, and offered to take him with me, she was pretty happy to sleep past 4am. So, at nine months of age, Tosca and I departed for the state of Texas at about 8pm on an August evening in '94. In my 70 VW bus, with all our possessions. We made it all the way to I-15 (about an hour from San Pedro), when Tosca had enough. He let go of a bowel full of diarrhea, in the cat carrier, then proceeded to walk in it. The smell was atrocious, so we pulled over to a Shell station, and used the hose to clean Tosca and the cat carrier as much as possible. I'd originally planned to camp near Flagstaff AZ, but the idea of a friendly cat with smelly feet in a pup tent was rather unpleasing. We found a motel, took a shower, and cuddled up to sleep away the heat of the day. Later that afternoon, we packed up and hit the road again. About 2 miles into our journey, Tosca went ballistic. He was **not at all** interested in another day in the cat carrier and on the road. I was seriously concerned he would hurt himself trying to bite his way out of the carrier. So I found a pet shop in Flagstaff, and bought him a leash. He spent most of the remaining thousand miles contentedly sleeping, and purring, in my lap.

My first year at UT was tough. I didn't know *anyone* in Texas. Tosca didn't either. I attended school all day, then worked in a BBQ restaurant until around 9 every night. Then I would come home, wrestle with Tosca for a while, and read all my email-most of it from the VW Vanagon list which I found shortly after arriving in Austin. Sometimes I'd play my guitar a little bit, other times Tosca and I would watch TV together. He didn't really care, just liked to see me. It was during this time that I discovered Tosca was a He. As he walked away one day with his tail in the air, there was that Major 2nd my music theory teacher had always talked about. When he was given to Samantha they said Tosca was a girl, which is why he got the name of Tosca-named after the operatic character. We decided that he was really named after Toscaninni. Yeah, right. When I slept in that 1 bedroom apartment, I was not alone. Tosca slept each and every night, on my back. He was my buddy, and I was his.

Samantha moved out here, bringing Kitty and Indra, and eventually Tosca and I drifted apart. He still slept on me sometimes, but there were more friends around, and they were home all the times I wasn't. We still had that special bond, but it was never again like those lonely first months in that little South Austin apartment.

Last year he began to have problems with Feline Urinary Syndrome. We kept him on the good food, and the FUS medicines, but he never really got better. He had a urinary tract surgery while we were on our run to Inuvik last summer, and had chronic backups ever since. About a month and a half ago, he started breathing really heavily. After a day of waiting to see if it would go away, we took him to the vet. They ran several tests on him, suspecting one of 3 possible feline viruses. After 3 days of waiting for lab work, the results came back negative. So I left work early, and took him into the vet. He stayed for 7 days, hooked up to IVs. The vet drained 200ml of infectious fluid from his lungs on the 1st day, and 180ml on the second. He was a sick kitty, but he kept on fighting. After he finally seemed to stabilize, he came home. I had to administer two injections daily of antibiotics for about 5 weeks, and he had weekly checkups. Last week he went into the vet and seemed pretty good, no fluids for about a month. So we stopped the daily injections. Two days later he began to develop a skin condition. The vet suspected ringworm, so we put him on that medicine. After a couple of more days his condition had worsened dramatically. He had open sores on his forelegs, seeping fluid. We put him back on the daily injections, to fight the infections.

I gave him a bath last night for the ringworm. He looked at me with a hurt, angry, sorrowful look, and let out a yowl. I knew he was asking "why are you *doing* this to me??" I felt pretty bad, and tried to tell him it was for his own good. Today, I loaded up his injections, got his pills, and headed back to pull him out from under the bed. He was so lethargic I thought he was dead. Finally, he moved. I pulled him out from under the bed, and he couldn't even hold up his head. I didn't think he would make it through the night. His time had clearly come.

I called the vets answering service, and they said they didn't know if they had the phone number for Dr. Rimkunas, who had been Toscas physician for all this time. They said they'd either call him, or call me back. After 10 minutes, I got the phone book and found his home phone, and spoke with him. I broke down on the phone while I described Toscas pitiful condition. After regaining my composure I asked him to Euthanize my friend. We met 10 minutes later at the clinic. Samantha drove me there, and I held Tosca in my arms all the way. When we got him inside, he couldn't even stand on his own, he just laid there on the table and gave that yowl. Dr. Rimkunas prepared an overdose of anesthesia, and I held Tosca tightly while he drove the plunger home. He removed the tourniquet, and Samantha and I let Tosca know we loved him as he faded out.

Tosca died at the age of 3 and a half, about 8:15pm, today, Sunday May 25, 1997, in my arms while I sobbed on him. I lost my favorite cat, and my friend.