OBIT: Malanga December Glover (Nov. 7, 1997-October 26, 2018)

Malanga December Glover, sometimes called Ms. Lu, last of Seattle’s 15th Avenue East Horizon Bookstore cats, has died quietly and attended to by loving friends and allies a few days before the observation of her 21st people year, or 100th feline birthday. Staff and visitors to Horizon Books on Capitol Hill will recall her frequent commandeering of sunbeam spots directly in the store entrance; and patrons as well as kitchen crew of the nearby Coastal Kitchen will remember her several unannounced inspections of that facility. Malanga is preceded in death by her mother Alegria; who was a veteran of Washington Heights alleyways in New York City; and her two sisters Yambu and Farucco. She and her siblings were born in a spot behind a furnace in the basement of a building on the corner of 162nd Street and Riverside Drive on November 7th, 1997. A traveller by nature but never airy or cosmopolitan in attitude, Malanga enjoyed food, books, wool in boxes or anywhere else, flamenco vocals, people and dogs, though she did believe the latter crew a little too intrusive. In remembrance, Malanga’s family is requesting donations of time or money to the nearest non-kill animal shelter of choice, and some meditation on Poet Robert Frost’s observation: “nothing gold can stay.”

—Michael Hureaux