While Joel and his fam­i­ly were on extend­ed vaca­tion, I took care of their cat, Sprocket.

He used to be 25 pounds (from the pre­vi­ous own­er who overfed him) but slimmed down to around 14 or 15, I’d say. You can tell he used to be much big­ger; if you run your hand down the length of his body, you can feel the bones on his frame stick­ing out promi­nent­ly, and there’s a fair amount of extra skin hang­ing from the bel­ly.

He nev­er got along with Dolly. For the entire time he was with me, which was just under two months, they got in about two dozen fights. Every now and then, there would be a tremen­dous cacoph­o­ny of hiss­ing, growl­ing, meow­ing, and run­ning from one end of the house to the oth­er. I’d say that Sprocket was more often the aggres­sor, but Dolly start­ed her share of fights. Even though she still has her back claws (Sprocket is com­plete­ly de-clawed), he had a large weight and size advan­tage. His bite is also very strong (which I found out from feed­ing him treats¹), I’m guess­ing from all the prac­tice he got from eat­ing.

It made me re-think get­ting a sec­ond cat while Dolly’s still alive. Two cats can fill a house nice­ly, but she did­n’t get along with him at all. Since they don’t know how old Sprocket is, the aggres­sive­ness may sim­ply be due to his age, but I’m not sure I want to take the chance.

In any case, I can tell he enjoyed the change of pace, which was liv­ing in a house with two par­ents, two kids, and two dogs, to just me and a cat. He’s a suck­er for treats, meow­ing qui­et­ly as a “reminder” to give him one. One fun­ny thing I noticed is that he seemed to have hard­er-than-aver­age paws. When pac­ing around on the kitchen tiles before being fed, it would sound like a horse trot.

Sprocket also loves atten­tion. No mat­ter what I was doing — cook­ing break­fast, play­ing games upstairs, writ­ing down­stairs — he would fol­low me around. It did make my Tai Chi prac­tice more dif­fi­cult, as he’d spread out on the open car­pet and roll around under my feet.

He loves to sleep on blan­kets, and would always fall asleep on my sheets when I was under them, most com­mon­ly near the feet. He got along espe­cial­ly well with Bronwen. When she stayed the night, he would keep her up by con­stant­ly walk­ing over her body, look­ing for a warm place to nes­tle.

I’ll cer­tain­ly miss him. Hopefully, he’ll remem­ber me the next time I go over to Joel’s house.

1. I don’t think he was ever fed by hand; he would always nip my fin­gers when giv­ing him a treat. Dolly is the oppo­site. She very del­i­cate­ly moves towards the treat with her mouth, and snatch­es the treat with her tongue. [↩]