Amanda texted yesterday to tell me that Cobb wasn’t doing well. Cobb, short for Mr. Cobblepott, was a cat we adopted when we first moved to Wilmington. He was actually living under the house we rented, having been left there by the previous occupant. Sometimes we’d hear him under there and we started leaving food out for him. One day the front door was open and he just ran inside. After that, he was our cat. He was a very sweet cat. He was big and yellow and had a pink nose when a few freckles on it.

Since we already had Bruce, we had decided to stick with a theme and give him a Batman-related name. We thought he was a girl at first, so until he was taken to the vet we called him Selena (after Catwoman). Oswald Cobblepott is the Penguin’s name.

Amanda said that Cobb has been blind and that Milly, in the last few days, had to pick him and and carry him upstairs or downstiars or to his food. He had passed out a few times, which Milly told me freaked her out.

Amanda had told Milly that she was going to take Cobb to the vet to put him to sleep in the next couple of days. I picked her up for school today and will have her through the weekend, so Milly had to say her final farewell to Cobb this morning. She started crying after she came out to the car.

Amanda texted me later to tell me that her dad had been in town and found Cobb under the kitchen table. He was gone.

I told Milly, and she was sad, but she didn’t cry until bedtime.

The rest of the day involved me volunteering as a WatchDOG dad at Milly’s school. There wasn’t a  ton that stood out about the day, except that it was the first time Milly didn’t spend all of recess with me. She and her friend Sophie wandered off now and then, leaving me with a group of her classmates telling me about the books and comic books and movies they wanted to make up.

She did hang out with me some though. Milly and her friends were playing what they called Gods and Goddesses, where each of them was the god or goddess of something. Milly was Jubilee (“Like the X-Man, er, X-Woman!”), the goddess of dreams and wishes. I forget Sophie’s name, but she was the goddess of childbirth and some other related stuff. There was one kid, a smaller kid I know from being in some of Milly’s previous classes, who was kind of tagging along. After the other kids said who they were and started running off to play, he kind of lagged behind and sort of muttered to himseld, “I’m the god of shadows and darkness. And death.” Kinda dark!