Our next-door neighbor used to house an old beat-up trailer next to our front yard. One day, circa maybe 2003, Mary was pulling up some tall dry grass in the front yard when an orange cat leapt out of that grass and ran underneath the trailer. She went inside and got some food and me. We put the food bowl halfway between us and the trailer and we sat patiently waiting for the cat to come out. After about 15 minutes, when the cat, watching us the whole time, was still beneath the trailer, Mary said, “Maybe he just wants us to leave him alone.” We stood up to leave and at that the cat stood up, and began alternately rubbing up against the trailer and rolling around on the ground flirtatiously, never taking his eyes off us. We sat back down and within 2 minutes he came over to eat the food and then to rub up against both of us with glorious outsized affection, even though we had just met.

He didn’t have any tags and we weren’t sure if he belonged to anyone. Mary named him Harold. I asked our immediate neighbors if he was theirs and they both said no. A few weeks later we were in our back yard and our back neighbor was out in hers, talking to a cat. It occurred to me to ask if Harold was hers and it turned out that he was, and that his name was actually Calvin. She said she barely saw him though, that he only came in the house in the middle of the night and that his sister (who was twice his size) beat him up. We told her that he was always in our front yard and that we had been calling him Harold, which we marvelled was so close to his actual name, Calvin. “Oh, that’s sweet!” our neighbor said. “I’m glad he’s letting someone pet him.” By now he responded to the name Harold, so we rechristened him Harold Calvin Moore (Moore being our neighbor’s last name). He was still our neighbor’s cat, but he was a huge part of our lives. We spent hours with him in the front yard, sitting on the steps with him taking turns in my lap and Mary’s. I was convinced he was an angel, brought to calm me down and force me to commune with nature.

No matter what time of day it was, Harold was in our front yard. Once, we left for a vacation at 4 am, and he was out there to say goodbye. We were gone eight nights and I was afraid he would forget about us or think we had abandoned him, but he was there to greet us when we returned. A friend once drove by and saw him sitting on our front porch post, peering into our house through the mailbox slot. Another time it snowed overnight and when we opened the front door in the morning, the lawn and porch were covered with pristine new snow, with a trail of little kitty paws that led to the front porch and then away again. Then there was the night Mary and I and our other pets were upstairs in the bedroom watching tv. I noticed that our cat, LuLu was staring at the skylight. I looked up at the skylight and screamed! All the animals in the room scattered. The creature in the skylight froze in terror and I realized it was Harold who had climbed up onto our roof and was peering into our bedroom.

One day it was just too cold to sit outside and Mary closed the door in the living room that led to the rest of the house and then went outside, picked up Harold and brought him inside. When I got home later that day she excitedly reported, “He came inside! He let me carry him inside and he stayed for a few minutes!” Thus began a new routine in which Mary and Harold and I sat together on the living room couch while the other animals roamed the other side of the door. Harold never left the couch – that was too scary – but we sat together and every evening Mary and I took turns reading Harry Potter to each other and our boy. On SuperBowl Sunday we got home late from a party. Harold was waiting outside and we brought him in and read our Harry Potter. But this time he actually fell asleep on the couch. When we were done reading, he was still asleep. Mary suggested we leave him there. We closed the door and went upstairs to our bedroom. I basically didn’t sleep that night. Every couple of hours I had to go downstairs and check on Harold who had rearranged himself but was still happily asleep on the couch. He was ready to go outside by 6 or 7 am, but I was giddy with excitement. Harold had spent the night!

Now during these months and months of acclimation, when Harold was outside he was busy defending his territory. He had no clue that he was a tiny speck of a cat, and he started fights with any creature that offended him. He generally did not win these fights and every few months we would have to call our neighbor to tell her that Harold had been in a fight and was injured. She would then take him to the vet. The first time this happened, he was so messed up that he had to be confined to a room for a week. Our neighbor invited us over to come visit. When she opened the door to Harold’s room and he saw us, he became so excited! We went to him and he took turns moving between Mary and me to head-butt and be petted. “Wow! I’ve never seen him like that!” our neighbor commented. I know it’s not very neighborly, but I was so pleased that he loved us more!

The fourth time Harold was beat up by some creature he had attacked, when I called our neighbor to report his injuries she said, “Would you like to just have him be your cat?”

“Yes! Yes!” I said. I had been hoping and waiting for this moment! We took him to the vet, he was confined to a single room in the house (our living room) for his recovery, and eventually skittish Harold moved in to the rest of the house, and became a tyrant to the other sweet animals we lived with. It wasn’t all bad for the them, though. We nicknamed Harold the Shop Steward, because of his exacting demands. Water had to be fresh daily – twice daily or every ten minutes was even better. Mealtimes were on a strict schedule, and three times a day was a minimum, not the standard.

Our neighbor came by to visit a few times, but Harold was uninterested, and one time even rude, so she didn’t see him in his later years. When Mary and Harold and I had read Harry Potter together in the living room, Harold had been scrupulous about dividing his affection equally, but once he moved into the whole house, though he still loved Mary, he was completely devoted to me. I have never experienced such fierce affections from anyone! All I had to do was call him, from anywhere in the house, and he would come running, rub his sweet body against me, settle in for a snuggle.

In the afternoons I liked to go upstairs and listen to Fresh Air podcasts, and he learned to recognize the sound of Terry Gross’s voice and come running as soon as he heard her. (If Dave Davies was hosting, I had to call Harold.) We would spend the next 45 minutes snuggled together. In the winter we had a routine where he would lie on my chest under the covers. After a few minutes one paw would stretch out beyond the covers and a few minutes later the other paw would join it. I would feel his little heart beating against my chest, and after about 20 minutes he would get hot or restless and leave. I always missed this routine in the summer, and I am so sad that we only got to do it a few times in the last month or so before he died. Winter with Harold was the best!

He was the smartest cat I have ever known. When he first moved into the house he was curious about the different doors to outside. The first time we showed him the door to the backyard, where we had also spent time with him before he moved in, he looked around the backyard and then back at the door. He wanted back in and when he got back in the house he ran joyously from the back door to the front door and then back again. It was like he had figured out this magnificent puzzle.

One of my other favorite Harold memories involves a baby gate that we had upstairs in the hallway that leads to our bedroom. Mary had cut a little hole in it. This gave the cats free range of the bedroom but the dog was only allowed in when we were there too. When all of us were upstairs, we leaned the baby gate up against the banister. There was a small space between the baby gate and the banister where Harold liked to hang out. I think he felt really safe there, like he was hidden but could observe all the goings on around him. After the dog, Schautzie, died, we took the baby gate down to the basement since it was no longer needed. All the cats were very sad and subdued after Schautzie’s death, especially Lulu, who had loved her dog fiercely. But they all eventually resumed their normal routines except Harold who still seemed down. This was strange since he hadn’t seemed to have a particularly close relationship with Schautzie. One day Mary suggested that Harold was possibly missing his baby gate. I resisted this idea because I was not eager to see the damn baby gate back in our bedroom. But Mary prevailed and we brought it back upstairs. When Harold saw the baby gate he actually leapt into the air. Then he ran downstairs, ran back up, ran a victory lap around our bedroom, and settled in his spot between the banister and the gate. I’ve seen dogs express joy like that, but never a cat!

I believe he totally understood English. He almost never slept on the bed with us as there were too many other cats, but before we went on vacation I always told him a few days before, when we were leaving and how long we would be gone. And when he was younger, he always slept right next to me in the bed the night before we left for vacation. We also couldn’t tell him he was going to the vet. The few times I made the mistake of telling him beforehand, even if it was a few days beforehand, he hid and we couldn’t find him when it was time to go.

Eventually I accepted that he was probably not an angel. An angel would not be such a butthole to the other cats. An angel probably wouldn’t pee all over the house. And an angel wouldn’t wake me up in the middle of the night chewing on the foil wrapper from my Dole Dipper chocolate covered strawberry late night snack. Who needs an angel, though? I could not have loved that boy more.

He spent most of his last day huddled in a corner behind Mary’s exercise bike. I had not had much opportunity to snuggle with him all week because I had been avoiding the germ-ridden bedroom where Mary spent the week laid up with the flu. I had carried Harold down into my office a few times and lay with him there. Mary suggested I do this again on Friday even though I would be taking him away from her. I carried him downstairs. He struggled just like he had earlier in the week, though he was very weak so it was not much of a struggle. As soon as I set him on the bed in my office he calmed. I lay down and he came and lay down next to me. He used to love to lie next to me with my hand between his legs. Cats are so good at training their humans and he would just sort of force me into that position without me even realizing it. On Friday he wasn’t interested in that, and I wasn’t even sure if he wanted me to pet him, but I kept a hand on him and lay perfectly still. There was a long sleeved shirt on the bed and he tried to sidle under it so I put it half on me and half on him and we lay together under the shirt for about 45 minutes. Then he got up and left the room.

Mary gave him some tuna cat food, which he ate. Then he went outside, spent about two minutes in his secret fort, and then came back in. Mary carried him down to the basement where he used his litter box. Then he got to spend a few minutes in the woman cave, a room that he had never been allowed in, due to his propensity to pee in places other than his litter box. He took a tour of the room and then went back upstairs.

When the vet and her assistant arrived, Harold came running into the room, jumped up on the couch and lovingly head-butted both the vet and the assistant. I was stunned. This was more life than he had shown all day and he seemed so happy to see them! The vet looked him over and said even though he was behaving this way now, she could see in his eyes that he was already half in another place and that we were making the right decision. I believe he knew exactly why they were there and he was grateful.

Once he was gone, I couldn’t bear to let his physical body go. We sat with him in the living room for 3 and a half hours. I have never done that before, but it didn’t feel like he was actually gone yet. Mary read from Harry Potter book 2 and I kept my hand on Harold the whole time. Around 11 pm we buried him in the front yard, next to the porch where we spent so much time together. We buried him in his favorite blanket along with his camouflage food bowl (he was always a combatant, our Harold Calvin Moore) and a Dole Dippers wrapper. We covered his grave with fall leaves, orange the color of his fur and green the color of his eyes.