While raising four people from puppyhood to adulthood, the Bohunk and I always had dogs and even a few cats around the house. We considered our pets family members. We still have a few animals in the family, and the similarities to having kids at home are worth noting.
Our three pets, the dogs Gypsy and Fiona, and the cat Winthrop, require our attention and care, of course. Feeding and grooming, as well as their emotional needs, including walks outside and companionship. These exchanges become a fundamental aspect of life that feels strikingly similar to the parent-child relationship.
Winthrop, almost 10 years old now, is an indoor-only cat. He was a stray kitten that the Bohunk found one morning while walking one of the dogs when we lived in Illinois. He was about the size of a teacup but meowed loud enough to be heard.
“A kitty followed me home,” the Bohunk announced when she came in the house that day. She had found (heard) him meowing near a house that bordered a cornfield, a good half mile from our home. “Here, kitty kitty,” she said, and he came out of hiding. I was skeptical that the little guy covered all that ground, crossing a busy road and dutifully following her home without any coaxing, but it wasn’t worth arguing.
We hoped to find him a good home, not ours. With two dogs already, we didn’t need a cat. But after a couple of failed attempts to rehome him, we resigned ourselves to the fact that he would be the Bohunk’s cat, except when he catches mice. Then he becomes mine for a spell.
My desk sits in front of a window that I’d left open overnight. My monitor, laptop, remote keyboard, and mouse hold a permanent position on the desk and are usually undisturbed. I was almost through with a first draft of a column that afternoon and left that file open. The screen goes dark in about ten minutes, and it’s my habit to leave documents open.
I was taken aback the next morning when I sat down with my coffee and saw exclamation marks, dollar signs, and asterisks line by line with the first part of my column hemmed in. I didn’t know if aliens were sending me a message, a hacker had taken over my computer, or Artificial Intelligence was asserting its dominion. My mind raced through every possible catastrophic scenario. The garbled text was a mess of symbols, a perplexing and indecipherable code. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
I found that half of the column I had almost finished the day before was gone. The part that remained was preceded by line after line of special characters. Following the intact section were simply blank lines made by the enter key. The page count had jumped from two to 167 pages. I found the missing half of the column on page 164.
You didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the culprit.
At some point during the night, lured by the allure of fresh air and the symphony of night sounds, the mischievous cat decided to grace my desk with his presence. As he settled in, he inadvertently stepped on the keyboard. Repeatedly. The result? A masterpiece of special characters and a mysteriously expanded page count. It was a classic case of feline mischief.
It just happened again, with the draft of this column. Countless dashes and other punctuation covered the page. My less-than-edifying text was split into three parts separated by Winthrop’s keyboard gyrations.
Yesterday, Winthrop was rambling from my lap to the Bohunk’s lap while we had our lunchtime TV break. The remote for the ROKU was, I’d thought, safely on the loveseat between us. It seems the cat managed to push the Disney+ + button (we don’t subscribe to Disney+, plus or otherwise, but it is a dedicated button on the remote). No matter what I did for the next ten minutes, I couldn’t get the whole Disney thing off the screen, cursing the damn cat the entire time.
Like each of our kids, this cat is an integral part of our family, teaching us about patience, understanding, and the complexities of unconditional love.
