Yes, one more cat's eating her Friskies in heaven, so let's talk a little bit about the music we just heard. My first cat that died, Stink (he had feline leukemia, only we didn't know it, and one day he stopped eating and the next day he was dead), Stink was still basically a kitten when he died so he was still doing adorable kitten things like head-butting Kitty and chasing his tail. Stink's theme song, in life and in death, was this particularly twirly Digable Planets song that still gives me a wistful fuzzy kitten feeling whenever I hear it.

Stink's replacements* were twins, Tarzan and Venus. When Tarzan was about Stink's death age he got nailed by a car, and the worst advice I got in the ensuing 24 hours was to listen to Stevie Wonder's "Another Star." I went home and put on that song and then I cried and cried, and then six months later the person who told me to listen to that song put that song on the office stereo and I ran into her cubicle weeping and made her turn it off. I still get choked up listening to it and it's been, like, seven years.

So Monday when I was driving to the vet's to face the inevitable, I thought, "Ah ha! Whatever I listen to now will forever be Kitty's death music." And the only CD I had in the car was that thing that guy did, the Radiohead songs for solo piano. Most of it turns out to be disposable, this kind of furious playing that tries to cover the guitar part and the keyboards and the drums and the vocals, and it all sounds like the contemplative section of a kindergarten ballet recital (though I do think the cover of "Subterranean Homesick Alien" is a keeper). So, sort of unfortunately for the memory of Kitty, this time around Cat Death = noodly piano music that isn't particularly haunting and probably won't turn up unexpectedly on the radio, except for maybe between stories on NPR.

*The Replacements album Stink gives me a wistful fuzzy kitten feeling, too