Non-pet people just don’t seem to understand.

I hate cats. I don’t dislike them, I despise them. They are demanding creatures that get their fur into delicate electronic parts, without the benefit of at least a bark. So of course, my wife decides she needs a cat, and I do like her, so we agree to get a cat. There are many, many restrictions placed on the arrangement (the little monster does not enter my office, it doesn’t sleep with us, etc., etc.) and we acquire a cat, the six-week-old runt male of a litter sired by a stray to a friend’s pet.

When we pick up this ugly piece of fur, it’s a Friday night (my memory says Dallas was on that evening, but I can’t guarantee it). We rush home, and I plop down in a chair to watch television (and studiously ignore the unnecessary creature). Annie opens the pet carrier, and leaves the thing out to roam around the room. It walks in a halting gate, and approaches my leg. Then it grasps my pants and begins to climb!

Understand, I look on this with the same horror most would if it were a tarantula…I am literally paralyzed with loathing for this small thing that presumes to use me as a ladder. He climbs painfully to my lap, then grasps my shirt and continues his climb! I am literally apoplectic, and my wife is waiting fearfully for the angry explosion clearly imminent.

The beast climbs to my shoulder, silent all the while. He literally looks at me look at him in revulsion, then spins once, sticks his furry little ear inside mine, and promptly falls asleep.

We were inseparable from that moment to the day he died a little more than a year later, of the FeLeuk I didn’t know he was carrying while he used my body as a step-stool. He was named Pixel not only after the monitor dot, but after Robert Heinlein’s The Cat who Walked Through Walls, for his uncanny ability to be in whatever room I was in, seemingly without requiring anything as pedestrian as a door. If I were sitting in the living room, he would be there, probably in his chair asleep. If I went into my office, he would suddenly be there, asleep on the floor.

We also did tricks together, tricks even a dog couldn’t handle without years of training - but then, it’s always been an open question who trained whom, considering all of our tricks required both of us.

There’s a whole lot more I could say about Pixel, and sometime I need to write a long blog entry about our single year as best buddies, but I only tell this much to make one small point:

J.B. had it easy.