Love Saves the Day

At first I almost felt sorry for Josh, because it sounded like what happened at his office was even worse than the things that happen at the Bad Place. That was before I knew how disruptive to all my usual routines it would be to have Josh home all the time. If I’m upstairs in my room with all the Sarah-boxes, trying to spend some quiet-time alone with my memories, Josh is also in that room, walking around in circles—like those pigeons Laura likes watching so much—while he talks on the phone. I don’t know why talking into the phone should have to involve walking around. I, for example, am perfectly capable of meowing as clearly and frequently as I need to from a still, sitting position. But Josh likes to walk when he’s talking on the phone. Every time I try to walk over to one spot, Josh is pacing around that same exact spot, and I have to dart over and around the Sarah-boxes to get out of his way. I’m paying extra attention to what my whiskers tell me these days just to keep from getting stepped on or tripped over. (Maybe Josh’s balance is so imprecise because he shaves off his own whiskers every morning.)

When I decide to go downstairs to the living room, where I could always count on being alone during the day, Josh comes downstairs, too. He’s still talking on the phone, opening and closing the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets without taking anything out of them (or even really looking into them) as he talks. This is particularly frustrating because a cat has every right to expect that when a human opens the refrigerator or a kitchen cabinet, he’ll pull out some food and share that food with the cat. Even sitting directly in front of Josh and meowing while staring pointedly at the cabinets does nothing except cause him to walk around me without any acknowledgment, as if I were no more than a couch or coffee table in his path. Sometimes he presses down on the handle of the can opener, which then makes the whirring sound that usually means a can is being opened. And even though I’ve realized that Josh isn’t really opening cans when he does this, I still have to run in to check—just to be completely sure—because what if the one time I don’t check, Josh is opening a can of tuna or something else I’d want to try and I’ve missed it?

Finally, when I can’t bear that frustration anymore, I go back upstairs to have a short, restful nap on top of the cat bed in Home Office. And wouldn’t you know it, Josh comes back into the room just as I’ve started to doze and says, “Prudence, I told you, stay off the computer!” and shoos me away without so much as a please or a thank you. And of course I know that he’s told me before to “stay off,” but I thought he meant only at night when he’s home to use it as a scratching post. It seems perfectly obvious to me that something so warm and springy and cat-sized was intended to be used by cats for napping. If Josh is looking for something to exercise his fingers on, he’s more than welcome to share my scratching post downstairs. I think he’ll find he gets better results anyway, because that’s what the scratching post is meant for. And it’s quieter, too.

Sudden change is always bad. Change of any kind is something to be avoided if at all possible. Even humans understand this instinctively as well as cats do, which is why they follow our example and fall into sensible habits, like always sleeping on the same side of the bed, or sitting on the same spot on the couch, or eating the same breakfast every day at the same time. As unpredictable as Sarah can be, she always does certain things the same way. Like the way she counts exactly to one hundred when she brushes her hair before getting into bed at night.

Josh’s being at home all the time is a very big, and very sudden, change. It’s disrupted all my routines, and I can’t remember ever having spent so much time with one human. Even Sarah, who doesn’t have nearly as many human friends as Josh seems to (what with his endless phone-talking), never spent more than one full day a week at home without leaving the apartment at all, and that was only on days when she didn’t have to go to work.

Don’t misunderstand me. It’s nice having a human or two around the house. Even though no other human will ever be as important to me as Sarah is, a well-mannered human can be a pleasant companion. They’re very useful for things like opening cans of food, or cleaning a litterbox, or running a brush over your back when your fur gets too itchy (like Sarah used to do for me at least once a week), or making a spot on the couch nice and warm so that, when they stand up, it becomes the most comfortable spot in the whole room to sleep on.

But even the most useful companion can wear away your patience if they spend too much time just walking around and getting underfoot.