Grumpy Old Man
My black tabby has a very limited number of ways in which he communicates with the world. Most of the time, he is off somewhere in the house doing his own thing, ignoring the other cat, the Pug, and me, napping and, I assume, plotting some nefarious takeover of the world. (Seriously, he hasn’t figured out how to open my laptop yet, but if I leave it open, I’ll come back to find all the settings have been changed.)
Sometimes, if I am outside when he thinks it’s dinner time and the front door is open, he will stand up on his hind legs and peek through the screen door to be sure that his piercing meows are heard down the street to let me know he wants his bowl filled.
In the Winter, when he’s cold, sometimes he will actually curl up next to or on top of me – that is if he can claim a spot that the high anxiety Siamese and the extra loyal, pampered Pug haven’t already fought over.
But really and truly, for the most part, for the last few years, he has become obsessed with food. I brought him home from a pet store as a eight week old kitten thirteen years ago and he’s always been a healthy weight and never gone a day without food; for some reason, however, he is desperately concerned about when the next meal is going to happen and this obsession doesn’t manifest in that delightfully cute yet annoying stereotype you see in cartoons and movies with the cat purring and wrapping his tail around my legs as he tries to trip me up while I walk through the house.
No, the Grumpy Old Man has become a master of torture. Perhaps he’s been reading old Fu Manchu stories about Chinese Water Torture, because his methods have a similar irresistible to ignore mind-pulsating effect. It started innocently enough — in the wee hours of the morning, when he was worried breakfast wasn’t coming soon enough, he would find something plastic, like a bag or a trash canister, and start licking it, which in the peace of a rural night is something akin to the sound of water dripping ceaselessly, which to a sufferer of insomnia and migraines is the same as the sensation of someone drilling a hole into one’s head.
If you can ignore the plastic licking, well, he will toss anything he finds on a table or dresser or counter or flat surface that’s light enough onto the floor. Oh, yes, my mother discovered that he will even wait for you to look at him, catch his eye, and then his little black paw will push your valuable ceramic keepsake right off the edge.
I was actually able to ignore such temper tantrums and just pick things up later until the dog came along, but now it’s a race between me and the dog to grab whatever it is so it doesn’t get chewed or swallowed and Hades knows this; he revels in this. (Once when I wasn’t home, he pushed a whole loaf of very expensive 12-grain wheat bread onto the kitchen floor, which of coarse the dog ate half of before he got sick; there was also the Ghirardelli chocolate chips incident where I came home to find my poor Pug hyped up like Speedy Gonzales on speed, but I don’t like to remember that as it suggests Hades is trying to off the dog.)
For a while he had the dog involved in the middle of the night/early morning conspiracy. He somehow managed to convince the dog that it was time to get up for breakfast and would get him riled up so that he would wake me up. First, it was at 5am, but the time started shifting slowly backward until once morning I realized they had woken me up at nearly 3am. So, I temporarily locked Hades into the dining room for a few weeks at night until I had the dog retrained to sleep until 6am for breakfast.
But now it’s not just about when Hades is going to eat, now it’s about what he’s going to eat. Hades has decided he doesn’t like any food that is “good for him”. Basically, the cheapest, nutrient-free store-brand cat food is all he wants, and if I buy anything else, anything that has vitamins and is good for senior indoor cats, well, it’s like declaring to the house, “Let the temper tantrums begin!”
And there’s no use trying to retrain Hades. (Not that he was ever trainable. O.K. I think I trained him not to chew on my hair as a kitten and that’s it.) He’s set in his ways. I’ve tried using all of the tips and tricks I’ve read in books and on the web on how to train or retrain cats. I’ve tried to discourage the naughty behavior. I’ve tried to do as much work-a-rounds as possible.
The fact is that Hades is simply not an open-minded cat. He has his agenda and he isn’t interested in what anyone else might want or need or think that strays from his wants and needs. As far as he’s concerned, he is the only one that matters and nothing I do now, after all of these years, is going to change that. All I can do is accept him as he is, do what I can to head off his bad behavior, train the dog not to run every time he hears something get knocked off the kitchen counter (yeah, right!), learn to cope, and love the cat despite himself.
I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of people in my life who are in many ways similar to my cat; I mean, they have their own agenda and they aren’t particularly interested in much beyond that.
There’s a teammate at work who really doesn’t want to participate on a team and has said so; he has said that he will never “cover” for anyone else voluntarily while they are on vacation and he realizes that means that we likely won’t cover for him when he wants to go, which means he will have to complain to HR that the system of requiring a backup during vacation is keeping him from his right to vacation; however, he can’t just accept that the professional thing to do is to just play nice with his peers to get nice back.
Someone else I know refuses to believe that any kind of ailment can slow a person down, let alone stop a person in their tracks for more than a day or so. He couldn’t grasp why I hadn’t recovered from my gall bladder removal after two days. I have to explain to him why I need to sleep a whole day after I spend a whole day travelling every time I travel as if he’s never heard me mention it before. After 30-something years he quit smoking one day cold turkey. He just made up his mind to do it and it happened and he doesn’t understand why other people can’t just make up their minds to quit their bad habits or get over their invisible illnesses. It’s beyond his comprehension.
There are people I talk to every day who can never compromise, never reach an agreement because they can’t see any other point of view or they won’t accept any other point of view.
Yesterday, I was complaining to my used car dealer that there were a number of items that they should have fixed the last time I brought it in that were required for it to pass the state inspection sticker they stuck on the window, but they didn’t and one of the things that is an issue is that the check engine light is broken; I told her that my regular mechanic found 7 engine codes when he looked at it this week, which is 1 more than when I brought it to them last month — and 6 of the engine codes are still there from then. She actually said to me, “Well, how were we to know that there were codes if the check engine light was broken?” Duh! My paperwork says that they sold me a used car that was up to state inspection standards. Twice now, my mechanic has told me that there is no way it would have passed the inspection, though the used car dealership put a sticker on it. The dealership’s agenda is to get my money and then get the car and me out of there while trying to do the least amount of fix-ups; I believe the intimidating dealership guy told me, “You bought a used car, you can’t have an expectation for it to be like brand new.” So, there agenda and point of view are a bit different than mine. Definitely their point of view is very narrow on the subject, enough for her to have such dizzying logic that they can’t be held responsible for not checking for engine codes when the engine light wasn’t working, even though they should have noticed that the check engine light wasn’t working because it’s an inspection requirement; so they couldn’t have passed the car for inspection with the broken check engine light…except they did.
The difference between people and cats is that you can at least converse with people and maybe find out what is going on in their heads. However, many people are just as bad as cats; at some point they reach a stage in their life where they simply can’t be retrained. The best you can do is head off their bad behavior, lock them in their kennel, avoid them, learn to cope, or accept them as they are.
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