Cat Fancy

Dear Oscar the Cat:

Awhile back, on a once significant newscast, Katie Couric said she absolutely "had" to tell me about you. She told me about how you have a remarkable record at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence in sensing which gravely ill patients are about to die, and about how you invariably show up at their rooms and curl up next to them in their beds in their final hours. Your track record was significant enough to have drawn notice not merely from Ms. Couric, but also in The New England Journal of Medicine. So I am writing to you in the hopes that someone there will read this letter and answer my question: Are there any more at home like you?

Now, I do not wish death on anyone, and it has been at least 70 generations since my family summoned familiars out of the animal kingdom. (Although I did revert to my primordial Druid self one afternoon at Saratoga, attempting to predict the future by studying the eyes of horses, but the beasts betrayed me horribly.) However, there are several people in my life whom I would like to make nervous. I think another animal of your great gifts could well branch out into some discreet, well, blackmail. If, for example, I could find another cat with similar talents, and given sufficient hyping by America's purveyors of alleged news, I might be willing to pony up a can of tuna or two to have it, oh, just sort of wander through the offices of a few HMOs I could name, perhaps followed by a woman with a clipboard making ominously extravagant check marks. Please be in touch, but there's no need for you to drop by in person. Honest.