The gray cat reappeared one week ago, three-days-starved, limping strangely on a mangled hind leg. “We thought you were dead!” I scooped him up, brought him inside, gave him a flea bath. The kids lavished attention on him as though he were a newborn child. Glamor Girl tucked a pillow under his head and Mr. Crazy fetched blankets from all over the house. Each day the limp improved and the mangled leg straightened: we were beginning to suspect a hoax. We also began to suspect an alliance with the opossum (whom we’d previously suspected of sending spies into our backyard to assess the possibility of another garage coup). The spies (stray cats) vanished as mysteriously as they’d appeared and sure enough the opossum was back soon thereafter, playing dead in our garbage can. When my husband overturned the can the creature came back from the dead and scampered-- well, waddled-- away; a year of cat food had made him fat. This after calling a dozen sanitation numbers to see what one does with a dead opossum, obtaining the “dead animal number,” where a lady donated the singular advice that he be put in a garbage bag, in a garbage can!