He was baffled by the enormity of the fact that my cat should have mistaken that bird for just any ordinary bird, baffled by an irreversible loss that nothing could compensate. One terrible day, as I was sitting on the porch steps reading a book of no interest, the old man came up the sidewalk and said the first words he had ever said to me-"Your cat killed my bird!" He said, "That bird came back every year! It knew me! It would eat right out of my hand!" He showed me the very hand it would eat from, in the gesture of offering, futile now. He would sit there for hours, under his maple tree, and beside his bird feeder and his birdbath. His wife had, so far as I know, only one facial expression, which I would not hesitate to translate as "I don't like him, either." Weather permitting, this old man sat outside in a lawn chair, pointedly not speaking to everyone who passed. There was an old couple living a few doors down, holdouts in the spreading student slum that was pushing their modestly respectable neighborhood always deeper into weediness and dishevelment. So I satisfied the basic requirements of cat ownership-food, shelter, immunizations-and she and I tried, pretty successfully, to stay out of each other's way. I had no particular affection for her, no doubt because she had none at all for me. When I was a graduate student, I had a cat.
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