Names changed to protect the guilty. Except me and I. That's still me.
I missed work one Monday because a cat came back from the dead.
Yes, that is the excuse. Yes, it was a Monday. Stay with me. Every link in this chain is real, and the chain runs through two dogs, a door, a gate, a rose bush, and my underwear.
We have two dogs, Tank and Spot.
This started with my daughter, Isabel ("Belle"). Belle wanted a dog. She asked all the time. That's what got me thinking about it.
My family is allergic to pretty much everything that grows, blooms, or sheds. So we did not get a dog. We got poodle math.
Tank is half Maltese, half poodle, a true maltipoo. Spot is three quarters poodle, one quarter Maltese. He is almost a maltipoo. He's working on it.
I had my own reasons too. I wanted my kids raised around dogs. And I wanted something that would wake me up if an intruder ever broke into the house. My wife did not want a dog. She agreed to one on the condition that it didn't set off anybody's allergies. That was the whole negotiation.
We got Tank for Belle. Tank took one look at the household and picked my wife. Immediately. No tryout.
We call him Tank because he believes he is the biggest, baddest dog alive. He is light brown and weighs six pounds. He is the opposite of a tank.
About a year later we got a second dog, partly for Belle and partly for Tank. A dog by himself needs a human friend twenty four hours a day. Give him another dog to play with, and he needs a human a whole lot less. I found that argument persuasive.
He came to us named Baby Grinch. We renamed him Spot. Solid black dog. Light tan carpet. He was the spot. The black spot on the carpet that you had to watch out for.
A year after that, I noticed Spot still hadn't picked a person. He followed my wife around. He followed Tank around. He was the dog version of the guy at the party who only knows the host.
So I made an effort for one week. By the end of it, he was my dog.
Yay. I have a dog.
I'm a cat person. I prefer an animal that needs interaction about once a month. I now own one that needs it several times a day. Yay me.
My job is flexible, so we run the dogs in shifts. My wife has them from seven in the morning until she goes to bed. I have them from when she goes to bed until she gets up. Call it midnight to seven or eight.
I am six foot four. Tank runs my nights.
Spot is twelve pounds and can sleep straight through. Tank can't. Nearly every night, Tank wakes me up because he needs to go out, so I get up and take him out. Spot comes along about one time in four, like it's a special occasion.
Now the cat. This is the part that matters.
Pepper is old. Grandpa old, for a cat, with maybe a couple of years left. He's been an outdoor cat his entire life. He loves every human alive and hates every animal alive. Pet him and he's yours. Get within three feet of him with fur on, and he comes at you, up to and including a two hundred pound dog.
That policy worked great when he was twenty pounds of feline muscle. He's eight to ten pounds of old cat now. Same attitude. Nobody told the attitude.
A couple of months ago, Pepper disappeared.
He used to come home every night to eat, sleep, and hang out with us. Then he didn't. After a week of nothing, I assumed he was dead. We told Belle, whose favorite pet he was, that he probably wasn't coming back.
Belle did not accept that. She went door to door asking the neighbors. All of them know Pepper. They love him, because he is that nice to humans. One of them pulled up their Ring doorbell footage. Pepper's last known appearance on Earth was the last time I had seen him. I was taking out the trash.
Two more weeks go by. I am certain he is dead somewhere.
Then it's eleven o'clock on a weekend night, and my son goes downstairs to let out our other outdoor cat. He opens the door.
Pepper is right there, waiting to come in like he stepped out for cigarettes.
My son comes flying back up the stairs.
"Belle! Belle! Pepper is back! Pepper is back!"
Three weeks. No explanation. He has never told us where he was.
Belle ruled on it. Pepper is an indoor cat now. Resurrection comes with a lifestyle change.
Before Pepper moved in, taking the dogs out was simple. Open the back door, walk out, and leave it open so any outdoor cat in the area could change locations if he felt like it.
Now the door has to close behind me. A cat who beat death does not get to go looking for it again.
Our back door has a feature. If it's locked, you can still open it from the inside. Turn the knob all the way, and it unlocks itself on the way out. Turn it only three quarters of the way, and it opens, lets you out, and stays locked behind you.
I think that's a bug in the hardware. The door company would call it a feature.
My wife has found that feature multiple times. She locks herself in the backyard, knocks, somebody lets her in. No big deal. And every single time, I made fun of her.
I've lived in this house almost twenty years. It had never once happened to me. Which, I felt, said something about the two of us.
Sunday night, Tank wakes me up.
I get up. Spot gets up too. Special occasion.
I'm dressed for bed, which means a t-shirt and underwear. Nobody puts on pants to watch a six pound dog pee.
We go downstairs and I open the door. Both dogs shoot outside to pee on the fence. I close the door behind me.
I give them about fifteen minutes. Plenty of time to pee, and to poop if the mood strikes.
Then the dogs and I walk back to the door.
I turn the knob.
Locked.
Twenty years.
It's the middle of the night. Knocking is pointless. Everybody inside is asleep, dreaming of electric sheep or whatever. Somewhere in there, Pepper is indoors, safe, which is the entire reason the door was closed.
Fine. No big deal. I'll go out the gate and around to the front door. The front door has a keypad lock, because we got tired of carrying house keys. Nothing to lose, nothing to forget. All you have to do is get to it.
The gate latch is built to be opened from the outside. From the inside, it's a block of metal parts about two inches by three inches by six inches. In the dark. By feel.
I work at it for a long time. Some parts move, and I'm sure one of them is the latch. Every time I move something, I try the gate. Nothing.
I am six foot four and overweight. When I put my shoulder into a door, it opens, even if somebody on the other side is trying to hold it shut. The one exception is a latch. A latch does not care how big you are.
Fine. I'll climb the fence.
It's a six foot wooden privacy fence. A little chain link fence, I could almost step over. This is not that. In my twenties, sure. My thirties, maybe. I am in my fifties. That is not a thing that is going to happen.
Fine. I'll sleep in a chair on the back porch until my wife wakes up.
It is summer 2026. The low is eighty six degrees. The low.
Eighty six is a daytime temperature that kills people in Europe. Heat kills tens of thousands of them in a bad summer. This is the middle of the night. Compared to two in the afternoon, it honestly feels kind of nice.
It is still too hot to sleep. I am sitting in a porch chair in my underwear, sweating, getting more pissed off by the minute.
The same summer Europe flew over for the World Cup and found out what air conditioning is, I spent the night locked out of mine.
Then I remember the electrical box.
In one back corner of the yard there's a big green utility box. It serves several houses. It's about three feet tall. The fence is six. Stand on the box, and it's only three more feet to the top.
Better yet, that stretch of fence is brick, about a foot wide. That's not climbing. That's stepping over a wall.
Two problems.
Problem one. I am in a t-shirt and underwear. Over that fence is a trail. The trail comes out on a street I don't live on. From there it's about a quarter mile around roughly twenty houses to get back to my front door. A large man in his underwear, strolling a residential street in the middle of the night. If anybody sees me, the cops are getting called, and honestly, they should.
I decide I don't care.
Problem two. There's a rose bush between me and the box. It's there so we don't have to look at the ugly green box.
My original thought: Roses are pretty.
My new thought: I hate roses.
Have you ever tried to push through a rose bush in a t-shirt and your underwear?
Spoiler. It sucks. Don't do it.
A rose bush does not stop you the way a fence stops you. A fence just says no. A rose bush lets you get halfway in and then holds on. Bare arms. Bare legs. Every branch has an opinion.
I tried. I failed. I went back to the chair.
Didn't sleep. Went back to the gate. Got mad at the gate. Figured the anger would carry me through the bush. It did not. Pain beats anger. Every time.
So the night went like this:
Chair. Sweat. No sleep.
Gate. Metal block. Nothing.
Rage. Rose bush. Pain.
Chair.
Repeat until sunrise.
For the record, I got these dogs to wake me up if a strange man ever tried to get into my house in the middle of the night.
There is a strange man trying to get into my house in the middle of the night.
Both dogs are outside with him.
It starts getting light. I try the gate one more time. Fiddle with the block. This time I push down on the gate post and lift up on the gate. Barely trying.
BAM. The gate swings open.
Six foot four. A shoulder that opens doors people are holding shut. All night long. And the gate wanted a gentle touch.
Too little on the knob. Too much on the gate.
Thank God. Hallelujah. I am a free man.
Front door. Punch the code. I'm in. The dogs spend a few minutes exploring the front yard, because apparently the night wasn't long enough for them, and then they come in too.
Upstairs. Bed. Puncture wounds are tomorrow's problem.
I wake up at noon, still exhausted. My wife hears me moving and comes in, and I give her the short version. Locked out. Gate. Fence. Chair. Roses. All night.
Twenty years of making fun of her for this exact door.
Her response:
"Aaaaah. That explains why the dogs wouldn't go out with me this morning when I was watering the plants."
That's what she took from it. Not her husband in the yard all night in his underwear, losing a fight with a rose bush. The dogs finally made sense.
And the dogs had been very clear. Nope. It's hot, and we already did everything we're doing out there today.
So there's your chain. A cat comes back from the dead. The cat moves indoors. The door has to close. The door has a feature. The feature gets me. The roses get the rest.
Anyway. That's why I missed work that Monday.