“Tom Brady.”  Hand-printed on the SPCA’s yellow card.

Male, tri-color  

Age: 1 – 1  1/2

Why here?  Stray, found in Nottingham NH

Responds to name: Yes

House trained: semi 

The penultimate question’s answer would prove inaccurate, the last a bit of sales puffery.

And he was a beauty: heavy on the caramel, tinged with russet-gold.  Enveloping glossy amber eyes.  When he curled up to sleep just so, dappled black on the purest white created an M. C. Escher image of  a platypus.

Brady was snipped before we were permitted to bring him home to his humans and his big brother, whom we had adopted a year-and-a-half earlier (“from a K-I-L-L shelter in Indiana,” we explain if asked.  To this day we whisper and spell out the word, even when the beagles are slumbering).

After his operation, with its attendant impingement upon his capacity to, well, tomcat…