Whenever I was at home, I wanted to know where Pippin was. I'm not sure why. I feel the same about any living being in the house. So if I didn't already know where he was, I would search him out, confirm that he was sleeping or napping or watching the outdoors in one of his favorite spots, and in the process, greet him and pet him. Or sometimes I would just look out the window with him for a little while. And then I'd go do human things (like books or email or tv or supper) and sometimes he would come with or show up soon after, and sometimes he wouldn't.
And that was okay. I didn't want to disturb him out of a sound sleep, or make him come be with me when he was more interested in the chipmunk antics out the window.
The thing I loved was that Pippin felt the same way. He wanted to know where I was all the time. Sometimes when I was home for long periods of time, like the weekend, he would lose track of me during one of his deeper naps.
Then I would hear him call out, the closest he ever got to a straight-up "meow". It meant "where are you!" and I was to respond with my location. "I'm in the living room reading." And usually after a few minutes I'd look over, and he'd be lying on the floor by the chair I was reading in, pretending he'd been there the whole time.
He liked to pretend that way. Any time I was in a room, chances are, he'd be there too. And he'd appear to have been there for simply hours. Even if I'd just walked in and he had been in the room I'd left minutes before.
He and I were equally susceptible to our imaginations. Luckily, we rarely "heard" a noise at the same time. I'd think I heard a noise, and I'd look over, and he'd look back at me, ears not twitched back, calm with no indication of having heard something. Ah, I'd think, I must have imagined it.
Sometimes I'd catch him looking at me the same way, and I'd shrug and say, "I didn't hear anything," and he'd lay his head back down on his paws and calm down.
Rarely, we'd check in with each other to find the other with ears alert (figuratively, for me) and eyes a little wild. Yup, we heard something all right. And then I'd get up and go track down the sound, and Pippin would follow behind, a little nervously. Sometimes, if it was a big noise, he'd hide and wait for me to come back and tell him what it was.
When we first moved into this house by ourselves, we had a lot of noise-tracking-down to do. Houses make all sorts of odd noises that don't sound house-like, and with a different house than the one we'd grown up in, we had to make sure all those noises really were house-noises.
A lot of "Pippin noises in the other room" have turned out to be house-noises. I wonder if he thought I was making them in the other room, the way I thought he was making them?
He used to greet me at the door when I came home from work. But this wasn't a dog's greet-you-at-the-door. He'd simply be in the kitchen (where the door was), looking out the window, or in his cardboard box, and my entry into the kitchen from the outdoors would be greeted with a lazy look. Oh, I didn't know you were going to be there.
This, of course, was more pretending, since the driveway ends at the kitchen window, and even if he wasn't actually looking out the window to see the movement of the car stopping in the driveway, he could certainly hear the car. And the car door closing, and me coming up the steps.
In the last year I had to start giving him lysine treats to prevent ulcers (yes, it does work for cats). He got two a day, one in the morning and one when I came home. The treats were thus kept in the bedroom (so I'd remember the one in the morning).
When Pippin discovered that I reliably went into the bedroom and gave him a treat when I came home, he started cutting out the middle man and waited for me in the bedroom rather than the kitchen. Instead of following me from the kitchen all the way to the other end of the house.
Once in the other house, when Pippin was younger (but grown), I came in the house and wasn't feeling too good so I didn't say anything the way I usually did to greet him. I didn't realize until that point how much he depended on voices to identify people. He freaked out and ran when this stranger came into the room.
I'm not the swiftest emotional thinker at the best of times, and it didn't occur to me at that precise point in time that he simply didn't recognize me. All I knew was I was feeling bad anyway, and here my cat was, fleeing me! I snapped in tired annoyance, "Pippin, it's just me!"
He stopped, halfway out of the room, frozen in a running pose for half a second, sat down, and nonchalantly washed himself. Of course it was you. Who else would I think it was? I meant to do that. And I realized then he just hadn't known who I was, and apologized for snapping at him. I made sure after that I always talked when I came in the door, and he never had to leave at high speed to escape the "stranger" again.
He was very fond of being with. I like to watch thunderstorms. From inside the house, through the patio doors, not from outside! The wind driving the rain into the patio bricks, the massive oak tree in the back yard flowing back and forth, the thunder crashing and vibrating through the air -- I love thunderstorms. Pippin didn't feel the same way about them. But he would sit with me on the floor at the patio doors and help me watch them anyway. Although most of his watching ended up being curled up against my side or washing himself.
I don't think he was scared of thunderstorms. I think, quite honestly, they bored him. The large movements of wind and rain and tree that I find so fascinating were possibly too large for him to see. Cats are small movement focused (like a mouse skittering by) and once you add his cataracts on top of that, I don't think he found much of interest in thunderstorms, aside from the fact they were great ways to make me sit still where he could be next to me.
Cats like routines. They like to know what's coming next. I really like routines. Pippin really liked them too. At bedtime I had a certain routine. This routine, in my head, did not include the last minute "I forgot something" trip out of the bedroom (which involved re-opening the bedroom door). But in reality, my bedtime routine almost always included a last minute trip into the rest of the house.
Pippin turned this into part of his routine by insisting that I follow him around the living room and back into the bedroom, no matter where the thing I needed to get was (water from the kitchen, my hair scrunchy from the tv room, etc.) I tried to get him to stay in the bedroom and "I'll be right back." This generally didn't work unless he was half asleep already.
Sometimes I was so tired that the last thing I wanted to do was make another circuit around the house. But Pippin insisted. He wouldn't come back of his own accord, but if I walked toward him (to pick him up and bring him back), he'd slowly walk away, at the same pace I used, and would walk in a big circle and end up back in the bedroom.
And then we would both eventually settle down in bed (sometimes Pippin had to go to the bathroom or get himself a snack or a drink, all of which were in the bedroom for his convenience) and turn the lights off and go to sleep. He would almost always lay down within touching distance (for me). I would reach out a sleepy arm and stroke a paw or tail or back, whatever I happened to touch first, and then we'd go to sleep together.
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