Winston’S Application

The local animal shelter has a rather optimistic adoption strategy.

They don’t walk you past cages or parade individual cats in front of prospective owners. They simply open a door and release you into a room occupied by every available feline, several elaborate cat towers, four folding chairs, and what I can only describe as hope.

Their philosophy, apparently, is that you don’t choose the cat.

The cat chooses you.

I assumed this was mostly marketing.

There were several promising candidates, each employing a different campaign strategy. Some purred. Some rubbed against my legs. One stared at me with the unmistakable expression of someone already disappointed in my life choices.

Then an orange cat three towers over decided subtlety was for lesser felines.

He climbed to the highest platform in the room, measured the distance, and launched himself directly onto my shoulder.

It wasn’t an act of affection.

It was a declaration.

My son looked at the orange fur draped around my neck as though this sort of thing happened every day and said, “That’s the one.”

And that was that.

We came home with Winston.

Unfortunately, Winston was arriving at a house already occupied by Dori, an aging pittie.

Dori had not been consulted.

Winston spent the next year trying every approach a young cat knows. He nuzzled. He followed her from room to room. He attempted casual proximity.

He received, in return, the occasional look of complete indifference punctuated by corrective paw slaps whenever he confused tolerance for encouragement.

Still, he kept trying.

There were evenings when Dori would curl into a blanket and drift off to sleep. Winston would wait patiently until he was sure she was asleep, then quietly ease himself into the little hollow her body had left behind, borrowing the warmth of a dog who wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.

It never lasted.

Sooner or later Dori would wake, realize her privacy had been breached, and Winston would be sent back into exile.

A year of that.

A year of Winston submitting the same application to someone who had already filled the position.

When Dori died, all of us felt the emptiness she left behind.

But Winston took it hardest.

He became clingy. He wandered the house as though he were looking for someone who had stepped into another room and simply hadn’t come back yet. Which seemed odd at first.

After all, Dori had spent their entire relationship making it abundantly clear she wasn’t looking for companionship.

Then it occurred to me that Winston wasn’t grieving the relationship they had. He was grieving the relationship he’d spent a year hoping they might have.

There’s a difference.

Eventually Winston settled into life as an only child.

Only cat. Only claws. Master of the high shelves.

He grew comfortable in his own skin and seemed perfectly content running the household from elevated positions where dogs, should any ever appear, could never reach him.

Then the Boyz arrived.

Captain approached Winston the way Captain approaches everything.

Carefully. Politely. Convinced anything with a heartbeat was probably a friend.

He was rewarded with a clawed swipe to the head.

Captain accepted the correction immediately and adjusted his diplomatic posture.

Morgan also attempted diplomacy.

He received the same swat.

Morgan considered the matter for perhaps half a second.

Then he took Winston’s entire head into his mouth.

We froze.

Winston froze.

Morgan let go, licked Winston square across the face, then collapsed onto the floor looking completely satisfied with how introductions had gone.

As if to say, “Well… now that we’ve got that sorted.”

Nobody had asked Winston whether he wished to be Morgan’s friend. Morgan had simply decided the matter. Somehow, that worked.

Those two wrestle now. They tackle each other across the living room. They chase one another through the house. Winston still hisses from time to time, mostly when Morgan mistakes “play” for “professional wrestling,” but it’s the hiss of a brother setting boundaries, not the hiss of a stranger defending territory.

He finally got the companion he’d been applying for all those years.

He just had to wait for someone too blissfully dim to understand he was ever supposed to ask permission.