A Dedicated Clorox Page

One family member who's gotten short shrift on the Remlerville blog is our wonderful cat, Clorox. So here is a dedicated Clorox posting.

Isn't he cute?

You can probably figure out how he got his name.

Once upon a time, Clorox was a cat named Jerome. But we took him away from all that when we showed up at the Humane Society, and he uttered a loud meow of thanks. The first thing we did, once we promised the folks at the Humane Society that we'd never let him outdoors (yeah, right), was buy him a pretty pink collar and change his name. The pink collar lasted about half an hour. The name stuck.

This is a Christmas card photo from several years ago.

Aren't those three of the cutest things you've ever seen?

Clorox is a cat of adventure. He likes to get in and on things. Sometimes that works to his advantage, say, when a big, bad dog shows up to kick cat butt. Or when he just wants a nap (his laughing place is in our kitchen cabinet on top of the lunch bags). Other times, though, his propensity to climb doesn't work out so well. For instance, there was that time the housekeeper came to clean, and when she left, she exited through the garage. When she pressed the button on the garage door opener, she heard an awful racket, and when she checked her rear view mirror, she saw a furious white cat dangling from his tail at the top of our garage. She pushed that button again, and Clorox took off. Fortunately, he came back at dinner time, his tail between his legs.

More than once, we've driven down our street, on our way to dinner or to town, only to have a neighbor wave us down and report that our cat was on top of the car. Once, our friend Michael Tucker came over for a visit, and when he left, he'd driven around the corner when Clorox emerged from his back seat. "Meow." Michael had to turn around and bring him back home.

Another thing Clorox likes to get in
is the charcoal bag.
We've had to put it up out of reach.

In the summer, we invite Clorox to come inside and enjoy the air conditioning. He'll join us for a minute or two, just to see what we're eating. When he learns we're having broccoli for dinner, he goes to the door and asks to be put out. His tune is much different in the winter, though. He comes in and perches on our brown chair right in front of the fire place, and woe be to the person who sits in Clorox's seat. He'll give that person all kinds of grief.

As lovable as Clorox is, he's kind of dumb. That's part of what makes him so lovable. Still, he won't be winning any scholarships. But that dumbness works to our favor. For instance, he'll sit in the garage and watch neighborhood cats jump up onto the counter top, rip open a bag of cat food, and eat it. But will Clorox do that? No. Instead, he sits at the foot of said counter and meows until somebody feeds him. Every time somebody walks outside, he thinks it's dinner time. Even when we exchanged his analog watch for a digital! And don't even get me started on Daylight Savings Time.

In spite of his lack of intellect, Clorox is a good cat. He's been with us fifteen years, and to make sure he's with us a lot longer, we're making him wait until he's eighteen before he can get his driver's license.