We have two cats and our neighborhood is just filled to the brim with cats. They’re every place, slinking along in the underbrush, eyeing you suspiciously from the neighbor’s stoop, sitting with their paws tucked up under them right under the front of your car.
Really, everywhere you look, you cannot help but see a cat or two.
And it made me think that cats really are like punctuation marks. You’re just surveying your landscape and there’s a cat stretched out in the sunlight like an ellipses or the cat is curved over something like a comma so you, too, briefly pause to watch the cat watching the bug or the leaf or whatever. Our tiny cat looks, I think, just like an exclamation point or a semi colon. The orange cat? With his self-important swagger? Full stop.
Tiny Cat Pants 
Well, then, my orange cat must be a dash – he’s always running somewhere. The calico is, I believe, quotation marks. She seems so inocuous until you join her, and then she grabs you and won’t let go. Sort of like a good conversation, only pointier.The old grey crabby cat? I dunno, perhaps a tilde.
"our neighborhood is just filled to the brim with cats. "That’s because you live on Cannery Row.Move.
What a lovely analogy. And very true.Prince Harry the Great qualifies as what we refer to in the publishing biz as an em dash—the long dash that continues and expounds upon a thought in the initial phrase of the sentence.Which is what he does when he stretches across the hallway going into the den, usually causing us to expound profanely upon several thoughts at once.I wish I could think of a punctuation mark to describe what we call "the belly walk of fear" he does when the Crazed Cat-Killing Neighbor comes outside. Is there something longer than an ellipsis, but with a similar function? Like … stretching … out … slowly … so … some creep … won’t … see … you?