A Life of Simplicity

Every dog owner knows that dogs love you unconditionally. Every cat owner knows that cats love you until you make them mad. Then, they get even .

My brother, Kenneth, and I weren't allowed to have a cat when we were growing up. Our mentally ill  mother thought cats were nasty. We were occasionally allowed to have a dog, but once we fell in love with it, Mom would give it away. This happened enough times to eventually impact my brother's relationships with humans.

Once we became adults, I adopted a cat, but Kenneth decided he didn't like cats. 

He had many failed relationships with women over the years.  As soon as things started getting serious, he ended it. After observing this for many years, I suggested that maybe a correlation existed between our mother getting rid of our dogs, just when we had formed an attachment and him sabotaging his relationships. He avoided the risk of getting hurt by ending it before things started getting serious. Kenneth agreed with me. So even though he didn't particularly like cats, he decided to adopt a couple of cats to cure himself of this intimacy syndrome.

There were a bunch of practical jokers on our father's side of the family, and evidently, my brother inherited the practical joker gene. He thought nothing funnier than chasing his cats around the house with the vacuum cleaner while doing household chores. One morning, before going to work, he decided his apartment needed vacuuming, and the cats needed a round of terrorizing with the vacuum cleaner. He chased those cats around the house threatening to suck them up into oblivion until he finally had to leave for work.

Had he been an experienced cat owner, Kenneth would have known better than to mess with those cats, but that lesson was yet to come. He didn't have to wait very long. That day, he arrived home from work to an unpleasant odor in the house. After a few minutes of investigating, he discovered the source of the noxious smell. The cats had defecated on the vacuum cleaner.

Some of us learn our lesson the first time we err. My brother requires a little more karmic intervention. To this day, he won't tell me what practical joke he pulled on those felines next, but it must have been something big, because they decided that defecating on his personal possessions wasn't severe enough.

Kenneth lived in Venice, California at the time and worked as a civilian at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. He drove to work on his motorcycle every day. Motorcyclists were required to wear helmets onto the base or else they weren't allowed to enter. One day he was running late for work. He flew out the door, hopped on his motorcycle and plopped the helmet on his head. Surprise! A cat had sprayed inside the helmet.
That was the beginning of my brother's new found respect for cats.

Amazingly, he's now an incurable cat lover and had to take a week off of work recently to mourn the unexpected death of his 13 year-old cat, Esmeralda. He got married for the first time, six years ago, at the age of forty-nine, and he no longer plays practical jokes on cats.