Miss Kitty has a new beau.

Scruffy, ill-tempered One-Eyed Tom has left the neighborhood.

No one's sure where he went. I suspect he joined up with some no-good hell-raisers and is probably halfway across Arkansas by now.

Miss Kitty never seemed to mind Tom's shortcomings. My wife and I, however, had severe reservations.

"You don't know what you're getting into," we would tell Miss Kitty whenever she heard Tom caterwauling out on the patio. His serenade usually came right after he had emptied Miss Kitty's food dish in the garage. Miss Kitty never gave our warnings a second thought.

Miss Kitty's new feller is a coal-black, longhaired, handsome feline. He's terribly shy around humans, but he sure has taken a shine to our calico beauty.

I had seen Mr. Black from a distance as he roamed the neighborhood doing what tomcats do -- which, by the way, I don't think anyone has ever documented very well. Then I started noticing him running from our driveway whenever I opened the family-room door onto the patio.

Mr. Black never ran far, just far enough that he didn't have to worry about my disposition.

One morning a few weeks ago I went down the driveway to get the paper. Even though there is a bright light over the garage door, I can't see well in the predawn gloom. On one side of the driveway near the street is a huge spreading juniper shrub. As I reached down for the paper, Mr. Black bolted from a limb in the shrub and dashed down the street.

It appears the tomcat has been sleeping in the juniper. Or waiting for foolish birds to fly in. Or a bunny to seek shelter under the dense foliage.

One night this week, as we were waiting for the freezing rain that never came, Mr. Black sat on the brick patio and began his mournful baritone solo. Miss Kitty was sound asleep on my lap. Since her activities are limited to eating and sleeping, she is expert at both. When Mr. Black started up, she didn't even register that she heard him.

After a few seconds, Miss Kitty perked up one ear, then lifted her head and looked at the door.

"Do you want to go outside and say hello?" I asked. Miss Kitty didn't budge. But she kept watching the door for a long time after Mr. Black realized his best efforts were for naught on this particular night.

When I got up from my La-Z-Boy, I opened the door for Miss Kitty to have a look-see. She peered intently into the night but chose to stay inside.

"Good kitty," my wife and I told her. "Maybe you've finally learned to listen to us." Whereupon she promptly jumped onto the forbidden soft cushions of the sofa.

"Bad kitty!" we said in unison. Miss Kitty, being a cat, looked the other way, assuming we must be talking to some other hapless animal.

There's an old story about what happens when you play a country-western song backward: You get your wife back, you get your pickup back and you get your coon dog back.

If you played a recording of a tomcat's pitiful yowling backward, what would you get back? Your catnip? That succulent field mouse? The baby bunny under the winter honeysuckle? Two or three or your nine lives?

Answer: None of the above. If a tomcat lets a sparrow loose in one instant, he's already thinking about how easy it is to get in the cat door at the Sullivan garage the next. So what's to sing about, except L-O-V-E?

As paramours go, Mr. Black is better than most. His fur is well-kept. He has never bared his teeth at any of us. And he is well-fed.

Well, of course he's well-fed. Which is why Miss Kitty's food dish has to be filled twice a day when an admirer is hanging around the place.

R. Joe Sullivan is the editorial page editor of the Southeast Missourian. E-mai: jsullivan@semissourian.com.