Ozzie, the neighborhood cat

When I moved into my house around fourteen years ago, there was already a black cat living in the neighborhood, and there was a black cat living in the neighborhood right up until last year. His name was Ozzie, and this is a small goodbye to him.

Nobody was ever quite sure whose cat Ozzie was. There were a few theories about which house he technically belonged to, but whoever it was did not really seem to look after him or let him inside, so over the years the whole neighborhood quietly took the job over instead. He was, for all practical purposes, everyone’s cat and no one’s cat. He was almost always outdoors, and he was simply a constant, a fixture, part of the furniture of the street.

We never even knew where his name came from. Somebody told me at some point that he was called Ozzie, and that was that, but nobody could say whether he was named after Ozzie Smith, the Cardinals shortstop, or Ozzy Osbourne, the rock star. I kind of love that we never settled it.

What he was like

Ozzie was a long-furred black cat, although “black” only tells part of it. Black cats that spend their lives in the sun start to rust, so depending on the light he was as much deep brown as black. He lived off the neighborhood, the local wildlife and whatever dishes people left out, so his coat was usually carrying some matted dirt, and every so often a neighbor would clean him up or even shave him down, with results that were not always dignified.

But everybody knew him, and that is the thing I keep coming back to. To this day I could knock on any door on my street and that neighbor would have an Ozzie story. He was never a menace, never caused trouble, just went about his rounds. Neighbors came and neighbors went over the years, but Ozzie persisted. More than once, after a hard winter or a long stretch where he simply vanished and nobody knew which house had taken him in, I would think, well, that was probably the last time I will see Ozzie. And then he would turn up again. He was a rock. He always came back.

For my part, I tried to give him space more than anything. I would offer him a snack or a treat now and then, but I deliberately did not want him getting dependent on me, because that did not seem like what he needed. Our whole relationship was simple and mutual: he would let me hold out a hand for him to smell, I would give him a pat on the head, and then we would both be on our way, each perfectly content. One day he wandered straight into my basement while I was cleaning, so I let him have a few minutes to nose around the pinball room, and then, on his own schedule, he strolled back out and went outside. KOTEHOK had no idea another cat had been in her house for four whole minutes.

Ozzie and KOTEHOK

The two of them go back years. My cat and Ozzie spent a good part of their lives looking at each other through my front and back doors. On nice days I would leave the back door open with just the screen between them, and they would sit there almost nose to nose, regarding each other with what I can only describe as mutual acknowledgment. Yes, we are both cats. Yes, we both exist. Yes, we both want food. For the most part they were perfectly friendly.

Only once did that crack. I was carrying KOTEHOK outside through the front door and let the two of them get a little closer than usual, and my cat got nervous and hissed at him, the first and only time I have ever heard that sound come out of her. It shocked me. I have always half-wondered whether her mother never taught her to hiss, because there is not a mean bone in her body, so hearing it at all was startling. I scooped her up and brought her back inside. Ozzie, for his part, was friendly with me most of the time, but he did once hiss and swipe at me, so I kept a respectful distance after that. He was an outdoor cat with an outdoor cat’s life, and I did not want to find out the hard way about anything he might be carrying.

The end

In his later years, the neighbor next door, Carrie, and her family really stepped up and took care of Ozzie. Like so many cats, he developed kidney disease, and toward the end Carrie was feeding him kidney-friendly food and giving him his kidney medicine. I even got to help: while they were away on vacation for a week or two, I went over and gave Ozzie his medicine at their house, where he was living his absolute best life, an old outdoor cat finally curled up warm and safe indoors. I always respected that about my neighbors, that a cat nobody officially owned ended up so genuinely loved.

Ozzie passed away at the beginning of 2025. Word went around the neighborhood that he had died peacefully on someone’s back patio, which feels about right for him. We never knew how old he actually was; he could have been twenty, or he could have been about my own cat’s age. We just never knew.

There are still days when I am out in the yard and some part of me half-expects that rusty black furball to come padding over to smell my hand and get his pat on the head. He was here when I arrived, and he saw a lot of years on this street come and go. Rest easy, Ozzie. The whole neighborhood knew you, and the whole neighborhood misses you.