Now tell me again just how many lives a cat has. We aren’t sure how many Sylvester has used up, but surely he must be getting close to the limit.

He came home Saturday limping — was that morning or late evening? I can’t remember. Leah said he seemed sore all over. He complained when she touched him almost anywhere on his body. That is pretty much normal for him these days. Not the limping, but the overall sensitivity to being touched. Maybe it was a sprain, we thought. Maybe he would get better, we thought. He was still limping badly on Tuesday, so we took him to the vet. She dragged him out of the carrier and palpated his leg while her assistant held on firmly. I don’t know why he didn’t kill everyone in the room, because he certainly would have if we had tried that. She said she couldn’t feel anything except a swollen leg. No breaks, no obvious wounds. So he got an antibiotic shot and came home with us. Today, Thursday, he can still barely touch his left front foot to the ground.

His routine lately has been to come in, maybe in the morning or maybe late in the afternoon, eat, and spend several hours asleep in a living room chair. Then he might eat, and go to the door to go back outside. And he goes, no one knows where, but he stays out all night.

There are at least three new cats around, two all white and one black and white. We know who “owns” them, but no one keeps them inside. At least one of the new cats is a male. We know that because we have seen him spraying in our front yard. The other two are probably female. We don’t know whether Sylvester is fighting them. If so, he’s not doing well. We are wondering whether he makes the rounds, visiting each one on successive days, getting his butt kicked by each one in turn.

We were trying to think of how many times Sylvester has been to the vet for ailments or injuries. We believe that the number is countable, but for us it is unknown. He has one large, hairless scar on the back of his head that took weeks to heal. There is another scar lower on his neck. I can’t remember which that one is. He also recently recovered from something (someone?) apparently taking his head into its mouth, with one set of teeth on the top of his head and the opposing set on his face, which included his eye. That was the time he had an actual dent in the cornea.

And, of course, there was the time he disappeared for six weeks, apparently spending much of that time in a neighbor’s garage/storage shed. He came home thin and with ailments of his fundament, probably caused by lack of fluids.

Before that he has spent time in stir I mean boarding at the vet’s for urinary problems. Was that only once, or was it twice? Who knows?

When he goes outside, I think of old movies about boxers. Sylvester is the one that staggers to his corner with blood coming from his nose, one eye black and nearly swollen closed, dizzy and confused. And still he goes back out into the ring.