When I came home Wednesday, a couple hours after it got dark, I spent maybe 15 minutes shooing a cat out of our sun porch.

The cat, whom we have named "Blackie," lives in our front yard and sleeps under the porch. We feed him twice a day and pet him when we see him.

Whenever one of us comes home, the big, black cat waits until you open the door to the sun porch, and then races inside and refuses to leave. If you put him outside onto the steps, he runs back inside the porch before you can close the door. Eventually, through a combination of treats from a bag and main force, I got him back out on the steps to stay. He glared at me through the glass door as I headed into the house.

We'd bring the big fellow inside to live with us, but we own an 18-year-old cat who already lives inside, and he is very frail. In a frolic or a fight, the old cat would be hurt by the big cat, who is bull-necked and quite young. Still, when our Thanksgiving dinner is complete, we'll take some turkey out to Blackie, the cat who lives, alone, in the cold yard.

What else can we do?

I work as a newspaper reporter, a trade that is rapidly becoming quaint. I work a couple hours on Thanksgiving Day, covering the dinners for "the needy" thrown by various churches and charitable organizations.

One of the dinners is hosted by an evangelical church of no declared affiliation. The church's preacher is a small man with silver-framed eyeglasses and a lot of black hair. He's a vibrating little fellow who is, for lack of a better phrase, "on fire for Jesus."

The little preacher's congregation is embarrassingly poor, composed mainly of single mothers who have found in Jesus a boyfriend who never hits them and their children, or at least most of their children.

Generally, the girl children of these mothers will come to the Thanksgiving dinner well into their late 'teens, but the boy children stop coming at 16 or so because they are embarrassed.

You can see it on the faces of the boys as they hit 12 and 13 and 15, the age when boys seek their own honor, when they look for something they can die protecting. I look at them and they look at me and they burn; they burn through the eyes, fiery stones of eyes.

I once asked the little preacher where he got the money for the dinner, since a collection among his congregation would not raise enough money to buy a pair of tube socks.

"I get some money from some of the more mainline churches," he said. "They want to feed the poor but they don't want them inside their churches."

And I drank a cup of coffee and took notes while, around me, the poor boys burned in shame.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com