We have two cats, Joe and Halloween. Halloween is aggressively friendly (read needy), has a very large personality and has thumbs so she tends to be talked about more. Joe, on the other hand, is what I call a pillow cat. He lays around like a decorative pillow (he’s colored like a Holstein cow — so he’d fit in a room with a ranch theme quite well) and he loves to sleep on pillows. He doesn’t do much else but eat, complain if his food dish is only half full and use the litter box (or anything shaped like a box, depending on his mood — just ask Diane).

However Joe does have one personality quirk. When he was very young, perhaps still a kitten, he became attached to a small plastic creature that came with a game that one of the kids got for a gift. It is a 2-inch-tall  turquoise dragon(?) with a round ball in its belly that clicks when you push it. I think it was used as the spinner or dice in a game, but since the rest of the game is now gone, cannot be certain.

It has a tuft of hair on the top of its head and Joe picks it up by that tuft, much like a mother cat would pick up its kitten (or like a cat might pick up a mouse) and walks from room to room with it. He also knocks it around the hardwood floors very noisily at 3 in the morning. If we find the toy and click the belly-ball, Joe usually comes quickly (for Joe — running is not his style) to check out the noise. I think he knows what we have, because nothing else but food brings him to us that quickly.

Sometimes the toy is lost for months at a time — usually under furniture and when we get around to dusting under or vacuuming behind the furniture we find it and stop what we are doing to click the belly-ball for Joe. Then he plays with it for a few days until it gets lost again.

Last night I woke up when I rolled over on something solid and realized it was  Joe’s favorite toy. He must have found it somewhere and brought it to me in bed. I hid it under the pillow so he would not decide to play with it when I wanted to sleep. He’s been playing with it this morning, though — it was on the kitchen floor a few minutes ago.

So Joe, despite his unassuming demeanor, does have at least one quirky quality — one just has to find it among the dust bunnies.