During my junior year of high school, royalty invaded our house in the form of an orange cat. We were surprised, as we viewed cats as oddities that dogs chased. But Mom, understanding that you can’t mess with royalty and drawing on her practicality honed while raising a totally blind kid, did what she could to make the house welcoming. She made sure that the cat door functioned properly. She placed his food and water out of the prying mouth of our pet Labrador. And she named the cat Marmalade.

I didn’t interact much with the cat except on Wednesday nights after choir practice. After going through my good night ritual with Mom, I would head upstairs and flop on my twin bed, forgetting that Marmalade insisted on occupying this space on Wednesday nights — and only Wednesday nights. Yowling loudly, he would disappear.

“Mom,” I would call sheepishly as I headed downstairs, “I sat on the cat again.”

“Now, Peter,” she would respond, trying not to laugh. “Didn’t you sit on the cat last Wednesday night?”

I sighed, trying to keep the smile from my voice. “Yes.”

So Mom would come upstairs and try to coax Marmalade to come out from under my bed. If the coaxing failed, she used a broom.

For everyone knows that royalty needs space.

Several months later, my grandmother and I were sitting on the opposite ends of our kitchen table as Mom prepared breakfast. Often called Queenie, Grandma appreciated calm elegance.

“What a lovely day,” Queenie sighed as Mom placed a tray of food in front of her.

Shortly afterwards, I heard in quick succession:

A shriek from mom.

A bird squawk and a flutter of wings.

The rattle of cutlery and china.

From Queenie: “There goes that damn cat!”

A snarl from Mom. “Got you!”

As Mom cleaned up the mess that used to be Queenie’s breakfast and trying to restore calm, she knitted those sounds into a cohesive story. Marmalade had dropped a bird after carrying it through the cat door. Squawking, the bird had flown to the top of a window shade over the head of Queenie, followed closely by the cat. The bird flew to the top of our living room window, where Marmalade caught it. “Got you!” Mom had snarled, taking the cat outside, squeezing it until he released the bird.

Miraculously, the bird, the cat, and Mom were unhurt, but Queenie was traumatized for the rest of the day.

But like some royalty, Marmalade suffered a violent death: murder by car. We never found the body.

About a year later, Mom bought another orange cat in honor of my sister’s seventeenth birthday and named it Marmalade II. Once again, my relationship with him started off badly, as I regularly shut him up in my shirt drawer.

Somehow, though, we became friends. He purred loudly as I carried him around. I obeyed his summons to be let in or out of the house, often at four in the morning.

But that all changed with the arrival of my first guide dog, a weimaraner named Heidi. During the first day of her first visit to Mom’s house, she cornered Marmalade, and might very well have killed him if Mom hadn’t forcefully intervened. Afterwards, whenever I tried to engage with His Royal Highness, he would give me what my Mom and sister called the IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou glare from his basket on the highest shelf in Mom’s bedroom.

But Marmalade II lived a long, happy life, outliving his weimaraner tormentor.

When Heidi retired, she moved to northern Connecticut into a house containing husband, wife, and a cat.

“Don’t worry,” the wife told me after I warned her about Heidi’s intolerance towards cats. “Things will be fine.”

About six months later, the wife called. Howling with laughter, she told me that Heidi, after watching the cat use its litter box, tried to follow the cat’s example.

“But she wasn’t quite as successful,” the wife said through her laughter.

Some time later, she sent me a picture of Heidi and the cat sharing a sun spot.

Which reminds me of Isaiah’s prophecy that, among other things, the leopard will lie down with the goat under the leadership of a little child.

But we haven’t quite arrived there yet.