OMG!

*sniff* What a lovely tribute. He must have been some cat!

What a beautiful kitty. And it sounds like he was much loved in the
neighborhood.

I laughed at the letter his human got from a child in the neighborhood
who said that Gus was loved, even by people who were "alergic". :) And
then there was the guy who carved an angel kitty out of leather and left
it for Gus's human as a tribute. He was quoted at the end as saying that
sometimes you can get really numbed out by all the violence in the city,
so that when his neighbor was recently shot, he hardly felt a thing. But
when he learned that Gus had died, all these tears came pouring out.

Loving other humans is complex - wonderful, but also, often fraught
with difficulties such as sadness, anger, jealousy, being reminded of
childhood wounds, and so on. But loving an animal is so simple and
direct and *innocent* - no wonder it's so easy to access feelings about
them.

Joyce - with a Smudge cat resting her head on my hands as I type