“When I come home, I greet my cat by saying “Herro.” Because when she wails in the night, as cats seem to do, that’s what it sounds like she’s saying. Like she’s forgotten where she is, who else is around, and she just yells “Herro?” into the darkness.
It’s now our greeting. I feel like I’m just trying to use words she understands. Meet half way. It also spawned a song called “Herro,” which is sung to the tune of Adele’s “Hello.”
It goes like this:
Herro.
It’s me.
Sicily [that’s the cat’s name]
That’s all the lyrics so far. Also, I just heard “Hello” for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I don’t know what the fuck I thought I was parodying, but it’s not “Hello.” “Herro” sounds NOTHING like “Hello.” That Weird Al must listen to a lot of radio to get those things right.
All of that is necessary to explain why, as I read this book, I read the title “Harrow County” as “Herro! County,” and I imagined the cat saying it.
I feel like I may have extinguished some of the haunting vibe of the book for myself by doing this, and I do not recommend you adopt this behavior.”