Walking into the house I am house-sitting last night, which contains the dog and cat I am pet-sitting, I thought about the only other time I had watched someone's pet while they were on vacation. It was a guinea pig that belonged to a preacher and his family that were friends of ours. It died halfway into their vacation and we stored it in our freezer.

Now, that wasn't necessarily my fault. That guinea pig was nine years old, and living on borrowed time.

"This is going to go so much better than the last time," I mused, unlocking the door. Trying to force the dog back into the garage as I was leaving, the cat slipped past me.

The cat. The cat that is an exact replica of the cat owned by the father of the household as a child. Original cat’s name: Bert. New cat’s name: Bert. Not Bert II, not Bert Jr. It’s less a cat and more a vestige from childhood.

And now it was out. I chased it around the yard for a bit, and tried to snatch it off the fence. In the end I decided to come back early in the morning and hope it wanted to be let in.

I had dreams about that cat all night. I was thinking “losing the family cat” could be added onto the list of sins I had committed in this house: making the toilet overflow, driving through the garden, vomiting on one of the bedspreads (red wine - not washable), totaling one of their cars. This fit in perfectly, my grand finale.

Nothing has ever sounded so pleasant as the cat bell jingling towards me when I called his name this morning.





...that was the cheesiest, lamest possible way to end this post. It's staying.