I had no inkling that getting a companion cat would result
in a spotless toilet.
On Tuesday, a friend delivered a cat to live here. Although
getting a companion pet had been suggested often after my wife passed, nothing
happened for over a year. Then this cat needed a new home. Admittedly I have
always been a dog person (and relished the possibility of having a West
Highland Terrier I would name Ewok), but was persuaded that a cat is more
suited to my lifestyle. They can survive til old age without supervision if
provided sufficient food, water and excretion space, while a dog will eat all
the food in one sitting if possible, slobber one-eighth of its water then spill
the rest, and crap indiscriminately. Also, I wasn’t sure I would be tolerant of
the haughtiness of a cat versus the devotion of a dog. But, first convinced of
the benefits of getting a furry companion, and then the overwhelming advantage
of a cat over a dog, I opened my solitary home to Whiskers —who was renamed
Buddy in less than a day.
Buddy isn’t super impressive physically. He’s of medium
build with long fur sporting splotches of white, gray and black. (I swear
there’s a patch of orange too but you can only see it out of the corners of
your eye; if you try to look at it directly, it scurries off and disappears.)
He has a rather small head poking out of an enveloping blanket of long fluffy
fur whose individual hairs apparently form a powerful magnetic bond with
everything else in the universe. Were you to come upon Buddy unexpectedly, you
would be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at a used dust mop laying
in the corner.
Buddy settled in quickly and made his primary lair in my
office. He rules the room and will not tolerate the intrusion of a dreaded Pink
Pookie (piece of string dangling a computer keyboard mop) unless, of course,
that pookie is outside the reach of a moderately outstretched front paw. (If
the pookie doesn’t hit him to attract attention then the string better or
pookie recognition is zero.) When pookie awareness is high and contact is made
though, a National Geographic Channel-worthy battle takes place until either
Buddy has vanquished the inanimate intruder or three seconds have passed. In these
attacks, Buddy gets most of his exercise. Unfortunately, the same is true for
me.
Evidently, one of the things I forgot about when
contemplating the mechanics of furry companionship was the process of shedding.
Buddy’s ability to change the color of a carpet is noteworthy. So much so that
instead of despairing at never-ending cleaning tasks, I’m considering featuring
his ability in a business by renting him out to change any colored carpet to
white in a couple of days. Maybe $5 a day. Two days will give you a basic white
carpet that masks the original color. Three days gets you a Persian Grey
covering resistant to two Dysons a day for 30 days. Four days rental of the
Buddy brush results in permanent grayish flooring (impervious to all but tiny
blood-sucking insects who live within its matted structure) for the life of the
home.
It was while contemplating the upside of this business with
Buddy that Nature called and the toilet comes back into the scene.
There I was, relieving a burdened bladder in standard male
fashion, mentally celebrating my own business acumen, when dear Buddy, silent
as a cat, crept up behind me and rubbed against my lower legs which were bare because
I wore shorts.
The unexpectedness of that event caused an involuntary
lurch, jump, multi-stepped dance, panic scrambling, or whatever– to say nothing
of the rather unmanly squeaks of hysteria
– resulted in a total loss of control of the guidance system of the
urination process. Not pretty.
I spent a considerable time in latex gloves cleaning toilet,
surrounding walls, floor, bath carpet, small cupboard. Everything seems to have
been hit except that darn cat
That’s how I got the spotless toilet.
