Day 21 – Introducing Thomas, the family pet

I am a huge dog lover. I’ve always loved dogs and wanted to have a Golden Retriever; I ended up having a pit-bull as my friend for many years, but that’s a whole different story. The thing about dog lovers is that almost all of us hate cats or at least dislike them. I am one of those people who would better jump off a cliff then stay near a cat or god forbid pet one, but because I am a masochist, I have a cat as a pet (well he is my cat but he loves D best; I wonder why?). I thought about introducing him to you guys, giving that he is the constant moving piece of furniture in our house.

So, Thomas is six years old, he got his name after a revised Shakespearean character and he is the weirdest cat I have ever known or heard about. When I got him, he seemed normal and playful like any cat, but in time he became plain weird. He sleeps almost all day but during the night he has this ritual where he needs to go into his own room and you must close the door behind him and turn off the lights, otherwise he will start growling and complaining loudly; because of that, every time we changed houses, we had to arrange a place for him to sleep, either the bathroom, or the storeroom, or another bedroom if we had one to spare (the truth is he always picked his space on his own). Another weird thing is that he never eats meat or moist cat-food, ever. When he was two years old, his vet told us to give him only moist cat-food with meat in it and nothing else for a week and he claimed that he will certainly start eating it rather then starve; well, Thomas had other plans because for five whole days he just drank water and went back to sleep without even as much as smelled the cat-food sitting on his plate, so we gave up and indulged him the dry cat-food he loves, out of fear that he will starve (stubborn huh?).

When he was young he used to watch cartoons with me, as in actually watching the TV, not just sitting on my lap, and we would watch Tom & Jerry a lot. After a few weeks we stopped doing that when he began trying around the house, the stuff he saw Tom doing to Jerry (oh yeah, good times). Once he fell off the balcony, from the first floor and he hurt his right paw. Of course we were all over him, caressing him and making him as comfortable as we could so, he basically could get away with everything, because he was sick. During that time we had to go away for a night and we made sure he had everything he needed and also someone to check on him. We were half way gone when I realized I had forgotten something home so we went back. When I opened the front door, I surprised him jumping up and down on the couch, and his paw was miraculously recovered in the twenty minutes that we were gone. This slick tomcat, looked into my eyes, came limping to the door and raised his pretended hurting paw in the air as if he wanted to tell me that what I’ve seen before was just my imagination.

If I was to take a walk on the memory lane I would pour out hundreds of Thomas stories, but I will resume by saying that he is the perfect dog; he sits on command, never goes into the kitchen, he detests human food, enjoys playing with my daughter and teaching her a lot of cat stuff (they both lay on their back in the sun on the balcony, playfully shifting sides), he doesn’t like our beds (that’s what I like to think), he loves taking walks outside the apartment although he seems terrified at first, he would make a 24 hour drive throughout the country behaving just like a dog and although my word is his command he would never obey it without having to say something about it first. So there you have it: our pet or, as D would say, the other member of our family.