From day one, Sarah and I had an ongoing discussion about the relative merits of cats and dogs. Each of us said the same thing: dogs just love you, while it takes time and effort to earn a cat’s trust and love. But we disagreed on which was the good part and which was the bad part.

Sarah had never lived with a cat before. She wasn’t willing to accept that she would have to learn how to approach Figaro, and how to read his body language. This got her scratched quite a bit in the early days, but they did eventually reach an understanding.

Before Nate came along, our weekend routine, and God, do I miss it, was to have breakfast at Red’s, and then wander over to the churchyard so Sarah could pick and eat mulberries off the huge mulberry tree.

By midsummer, the mulberry tree, like most mulberry trees, had a thick carpet of overripe windfall berries underneath it. Sarah would wade right in, heedless of the mess, and her Tevas would leave purple footprints down the sidewalk afterwards. I, fastidious to the point of helplessness as always, would pick my way around the perimeter, trying not to get messy, but she would always beg me to stop dithering and come help her reach the best berries.

One day, while she picked, we were chatting about cats and dogs, as usual: Sarah depicting cats as aloof and mean, and I characterizing dogs as slavish and sloppy. All of a sudden, this ENORMOUS dog (a “hound from Hell,” when she told the story) came tearing across the churchyard, making a beeline straight for us. Sarah told me later that she was thinking, “Oh, crap, it’s going to eat us and Dave will win the argument.” He pounded through the mulberries, planted his giant paws on my chest, slobbered all over my face, and took off. I stood there, paralyzed, unable to speak. She giggled, “Oh, quit it, you big baby. He was just being friendly.” I turned around to face her, revealing the two huge purple pawprints on my favorite white T-shirt.

When she finally stopped laughing, she told me she could get the stain out. It took her two weeks of repeated soakings and rinsings, but she did it.

We each thought that this incident had finally settled the argument in our favor, but we were both wrong. I held up the nearly-ruined shirt as an example of how dogs epitomized chaos triumphing over order; she countered by saying that it took a special kind of crazy to believe that it was even possible to keep a white T-shirt pristine forever.

She was right, but I still prefer cats. At least I don’t have to empty Figaro three times a day.