#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 idea of spending ten to twenty years responsible for another living being’s food, health, and entertainment has always been way too much for me—especially when I barely manage my own living needs.
But compress the whole experience into nine days, and a different side of pet ownership emerges: less obligation and annoyance, more curiosity, wonder, and maybe even affection.
Brock is the tuxedo cat owned by my brother and his girlfriend Lysa, who had adopted him about a year earlier. I’d always found him unusually quiet—not just literally, but in the way he seemed to blend into whatever room he occupied. His one conspicuous feature was a black patch on his nose resembling a mustache, which made him look like a distinguished professor cat. This fit his favorite habit of standing at a windowsill or stair railing and silently observing the world below.
I don’t know how much of 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 him. And with my brother and Lysa taking a trip to Nova Scotia in late August, it would be just me and him for a full week.
When my brother brings him over Friday, the first thing that strikes me is his soft meowing as he pleads to be let out from the carrier. It sounds nothing like the exaggerated “meow” humans imitate—and somehow seems to come from the room itself rather than from one obvious point.
For the first day or two, Brock stays hidden. Whenever I enter the guest room he has commandeered, he’s either under the bed—barely visible except for the green flash of his eyes—or literally inside the couch. I discover the latter after twenty minutes of failing to find him anywhere and finally noticing a distinctly cat-shaped bulge in the upholstery.1
Eventually, aided by one of those tube treats that my brother says Brock goes insane for, he starts emerging around me. From there things escalate quickly. I let him explore the house, then nervously trail him for hours as he darts from room to room and object to object. The place is several times larger than my brother’s condo, and he clearly loves it.
Soon, whenever I come home from work and open his door, Brock is already standing inches away, apparently having heard my footsteps and prepared to welcome his (temporary) owner home.
Through the week, Brock inspects everything with absurd seriousness: artwork, floor tiles, houseplants, and even the produce in the refrigerator whenever I make the mistake of opening it near him.
The highlight comes Sunday night. I wake to a loud crash and, half-conscious, briefly wonder whether someone is in the house. I already mostly suspect Brock, though I have no idea how a small cat could make that much noise. I hear him meowing from his room, open the door, and he bolts out. He tears through the hallway, downstairs, into other rooms, sniffing everything with narrowed eyes like he’s conducting an inspection.
I have no idea what he’s doing, and a moderately paranoid part of me starts wondering whether the crash came from somewhere else and Brock has somehow gone into surveillance mode to protect the house from an intruder. So naturally I let him continue his dutiful security sweep for another two hours.
Then the same thing happens on later nights, and the truth becomes clearer: Brock has apparently figured out that making enough noise at an inconvenient hour gets me to open the door.
Soon my brother returns and Brock goes home. I don’t miss him in any cliché emotional way, but I do miss living alongside this mysterious, oddly intelligent creature with some quiet agenda of his own.2
Cats are special creatures, indeed.
- The couch had a large hollow space in the back accessible only through small openings at the corners. I never actually saw Brock enter or leave it; cats apparently have supernatural flexibility.
- Brock, for his part, completely forgets about me: when I visit my brother’s condo three months later, he immediately runs under the bed and hides there for the rest of the visit.