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.