While cats are my pet of choice, and I was enjoying getting to know the gray kitty, I wasn’t ready to make a long-term commitment.
I had a cat for most of my adult life, Hollywood, who died several years ago at the age of 17. When Hollywood died, I consciously said I was going to wait until another cat “found me.”

For months, I chased the gray cat away from the front of the refrigerator door. I terrorized him in the yard with the garden hose. I protested when I came home and caught Tommy shaving and the gray kitty watching from his perch on top of the toilet.
This went on an on.

At one point, my friend Mandy sagely counseled, “If you’re waiting for a cat to find you, what more are you waiting for?”
Then when we were trapping kittens at night, we let the gray kitty spend the night, to protect him from the unnecessary trauma of the trap.
Somehow it just seemed right to have him at the foot of the bed.

For a while after that, it was back and forth. We were only toying with the idea of making him a part of the family. I looked up the meaning of possible names, watched him intently, noting possible flaws and thought about how much this would all cost.

Then, the night after we took the last kitten to the Humane Society, I saw the gray cat doing something over by the mulch pile. He was definitely “going at” something in the twilight. I retrieved a flashlight from the house and came out to check it out.
There, in the beam of my flashlight, the gray cat was triumphing over the capture of a big mouse/rat — a big, hairy, beady-eyed thing.

Now, the cat had managed not only to wheedle itself into my heart, he had also proved himself useful.
A couple of days before Valentine’s Day, Tommy went over to the neighbor’s house and told them “my girlfriend loves your cat,” and asked them if we could have him.
The neighbors did not hesitate, and had not had the cat neutered, which made me feel OK about the fact that I had coveted another man’s cat.

I named him Moxie. Chutzpah was another consideration, but that would sound too much like I was coughing if I called him from the front porch in the middle of the night.
These past several weeks have been a sickening love-fest.

Most women can remember high school when their best friend had a crush on a boy or had a new boyfriend. It’s difficult to hold a conversation during this phase of a new relationship, because the person besieged by new love can talk of almost nothing except for the latest, cutest new thing their beloved said or did.
It’s been pretty much the same with Moxie.

He’s a gray kitty. However, if you asked me last week, I would have told you he is gray and in a certain light the fur on the end of his feet look silver, like the silver tips of a noble fir.
I marveled, and repeated to my friends who would listen, about his prowess at climbing trees. When there was a second rat/mouse dominated by his stealth, I raced over to tell my best friend next door the gory details.
I’ve also trained him to come and snuggle those first few minutes after I wake up, as if we are training for a future entry into the cat snuggling Olympics.

For a while there, I also came home from work cooing “where’s my favorite boy?”
My boyfriend, who had lost “favorite boy” status, would point in the general direction of the cat.