#173. Brock (Sunday, August 17, 2025)

What was your best day…of taking care of a pet?

I am not a pet person. Never have been, never will be. The commitment to ten to twenty years of being the sole provider for the living, nutritional, and entertainment needs for another living being was always way too much for me to take on—especially when I was already only doing the bare minimum with respect to my own living needs. And I’m sure I’m not alone.

But compress that full pet experience into nine short days, and a different part of the equation comes to the forefront. Less obligation and annoyance, but more… curiosity, wonder, and maybe even affection?

Brock is the name of the tuxedo cat owned by my brother and his girlfriend Lysa, which they had obtained as a kitten about a year before this.¹ And I’d always found him to be a very “quiet” creature. Both in terms of being always peaceful and stoic, but also with the softness of his features that causes him to blend in as just a natural (but distinctly living) part of the environment. His only notable feature was this small black patch on his nose, which resembles a mustache and makes him look like a distinguished professor cat—which fit his favorite habit of standing at a windowsill or stair railing and just observing the world down below with full, undivided curiosity.

I don’t know much of all this applies to all cats, or just Brock. But in any case, from the day I first met him, I could see a bit of myself in that little feline. And with my brother and Lysa taking a trip to Nova Scotia in late August, I could finally get some time to spend with him. Just me and him, for a full week plus.

When my brother brings Brock over on Friday, the first thing that stands is the soft meowing noises as he demands to be let out of his portable container. They sound unnatural to me, completely unlike how a person would imitate a cat meowing (obviously) and coming as a sound from the larger ambience of the room rather than a specific direction or entity within it (less obvious).

And for the first day or two, Brock stays firmly hidden. Every time I walk into the guest bedroom (which he’s commandeered for his bed and toys and automatic food and waste dispenser and litter), I see him either hidden under the bed—barely visible except the flashing green of his eyes—or literally inside the couch. Which I first realized when noticing a distinct, cat-like bulge there after twenty minutes of finding no cat anywhere else in the room (and panicking).²

Eventually with the help of this special liquid-in-a-tube treat (which my brother says makes Brock go wild), Brock starts coming out in my presence. And from there, it escalates quickly. He wants to escape this confined space, so I let him out to explore the house—leading me to nervous have to run after him and keep a close eye on him for multiple hours as he darts for room to room and object to object, almost like he’s playing a game with me. (The whole house is several times the size of my brother’s condo, so he’s clearly loving this.) And soon enough, every day when I return from the office and open the door to his room, without fail I see Brock there—standing inches from the doorway, having heard the footsteps and thus prepared to welcome his (apparent) owner home.

And through the week, Brock’s curiosity fully comes out. He inspects each piece of art hanging on the walls, each tile on the floor, each house plant, each item of produce in the fridge (which I accidentally open in his presence) with the greatest level of meticulousness.

The highlight of his visit is Sunday night. I wake up in the middle of the night to a loud crashing sound. In my half-conscious state, I have no idea what could be its source—and my mind partly jumps to the fear that it was a burglar, while in the mind I already mostly suspect Brock (though I have no idea how a small cat could make such a loud sound). In any case, I hear meowing from Brock’s room, so I go and open the door, and he runs out instantly. From there, he starts darting around even more aggressively, into the hall, to the other room, down the stairs, with his eyes narrowed and sniffing everything he comes across like he’s performing an inspection.

I’m not clear what Brock’s intentions are, but that moderately-sized, paranoid part of me legitimately thinks that the noise from another source, and Brock is surveilling the house trying to protect it from the potential intruder. He’s sprung into action as the guard cat for this residence, and I have no choice but to let him perform his role dutifully. This goes on for another two hours; and after several more nights of loud crashing midnight noises tells me that, yeah, this is just Brock tricking me (at the most inconvenient times) to let him leave the small bedroom.

Pretty soon, my brother has returned and he goes back. And while I don’t miss him in any cliché emotional way, a large part of me does miss being in the presence of this mysterious, oddly intelligent being with its own quiet, hidden agenda.³

Cats are special creatures, indeed.

They didn’t name him. I believe he and another (female) cat named Misty had been given together to the shelter by their previous owner—who was obviously a Pokémon fan.
The couch in that room was a weird one with this big empty space at the back, which you could only access through these small holes on the corners. I never saw Brock come in and out, but apparently cats’ bodies have supernatural flexibility.
This longing builds up slightly with each passing month. Though Brock, for his part, completely forgets about me. The next time I visit my brother’s condo in three months, Brock runs and hides from me under the bed for the duration of the visit.