The Day Smokey Died

It’s funny how life is. Sometimes when things seem the worst and can’t get any worse, how the outcome turns out totally different from what we expected. What’s the point? The point is, there is ALWAYS hope and life may surprise you and give you a happier, more positive result than what you expected.

I decided to share a story that happened to my brother and I when we were kids that demonstrates this concept in a very personal way…

When my brother and I were growing up, our family would always have pets around the house. My parents were big-time animal lovers which meant that there was never a time that we didn’t have a cat or some other pet around such as gerbils, guinea pigs, salamanders or gold fish.

Primarily, the pet of choice were cats and we usually would have anywhere from 1-5 or six cats running around the house. Every time they were outside and it was time for them to eat their dinner, grandma or my brother, mom or I would simply shake the box of Friskees and those felines would come running.

One of our favorite cats of all time was this black cat that we named Smokey…yep, we named him because he was black…we were very creative back then. Anyway, he was an awesome little thing…he always played with us then would jump up onto our laps at the end of the day, curl up into a ball, then go to sleep and purr.

We lived in a simple, Cape Cod style house and it was located about a block away from a busy highway named Atlantic Avenue. My dad would take that road to drive to work every day as well as my mom. It was also a road that lead directly to the beach…so it was a relatively busy road.

There were many times when we were traveling on the road that we would see the bodies of animals that were hit by oncoming cars along the road, and it would always make us feel bad knowing that somewhere in our neighborhood some kind lost their dear pet.

One morning, my brother and I were in our living room watching TV when my dad called from his work with bad news…Smokey, our beloved pet was dead. He had been hit by a car and my father had seen his body by the roadside.

Needless to say, my brother and I were devastated. We cried and cried. We decided that we would do the right thing. We would go to the road, scoop him up and give him a proper burial…and that’s what we did. I went to the shed and picked out a coal shovel and my brother got a water bucket. We walked to the road, found our cat, put him in the bucket and brought him back home,

We then went to the backyard to my grandma’s garden and chose a beautiful little spot to bury our dear Smokey…and that’s what we did. We even made a little tombstone from a piece of wood and wrote “Smokey” and it date of birth and death on it, just like a real cemetery. After a few final thoughts and maybe even a short prayer for the critter, we said our final good-byes and left crying and heartbroken.

Later in the day, we were getting ready to go to the park and play some baseball. We were standing in the front yard of our house waiting for our friends when, all of a sudden, a real-life miracle happened…we couldn’t believe our eyes as our beloved, dead pet, Smokey came bounding up the sidewalk, meowing and acting like nothing happened. We picked up the cat, jumped up and down in total glee. As we hugged our little buddy, we kept yelling…it’s a miracle! It’s a miracle!

After a while, we looked at each other as said, how is this possible? How could the cat have come back to life? God certainly COULD work in mysterious ways but did He REALLY bring our pet back to life…we had to know for sure.

We decided that we would go back to the grave site that we had made and see for sure how our cat managed to come back to life. Had it really been dead? Maybe it had just been knocked out and we accidentally buried it when it was still alive.

Imagine out great surprise when we arrived at the site and found it totally unchanged. The ground was still the same as we left it and nothing had moved!

What did that mean? We were totally stunned but at the same time we had the biggest smiles on our faces that any kid could have…WE HAD BURIED THE WRONG CAT!!!