Obi Opens Doors

It was only a few months after we moved into our new house, that Jason, our oldest son, began to report on strange occurrences during the wee hours of the morning.

He claimed that someone – or something – was opening his bedroom door – at night.  Like many a teenager, Jason had begun closing his bedroom door at night, and yet, much to his surprise, the bedroom door was open in the morning.  Strangely, this phenomena was not “predictable”; sometimes it happened (or so Jason claimed), or it didn’t.  In other words, the bedroom door sometimes, when closed at night, was still closed in the morning.

Frankly, I dismissed Jason’s bedroom door claims to simply being poor memory on Jason’s part or, perhaps, he was just making up a story because it sounded freaky.  I surmised that maybe he simply believed that he had closed his door, when, in fact, his actions, had not caught up with his intentions.

After a few more weeks, Jason began to blame the mysterious door opening phenomena on the cat.  And not just any cat, but, specifically, Obi-Kat.  Jason liked Obi.  Obi liked Jason.  Obi occasionally slept on Jason’s bed. And now, Obi was being accused of opening doors.

This was, in my mind, preposterous.  After all, why would a cat want to open doors, and, if doors were to be opened, why open Jason’s door, of all possible other doors allegedly worth opening?  The more I thought about it, I came to the conclusion that cat’s simply can’t open doors for one key reason: they don’t have hands, an opposable thumb, nor, truth be told, the intellectual wherewithal to associate door mechanics with door openings.

There was only one thing to be done.

We all began to make fun of Jason.

We made fun of his stories about his bedroom door (and no other doors) being opened, routinely, by Obi.  “Oh Sure”, we said, “Obi just happens to have a little black pouch with burglary tools”, or, “Sure, you say it’s Obi, but really, it could be one of the other cats – you just THINK it’s Obi, because you like Obi more than the other cats”.  Jason would vigorously defend his case. We would have huge debates (backed up by detailed illustrations and mathematics) about whether or not a cat could even open a door.

Jason would emphatically claim that he could “hear noises” late at night of his door handle being pulled down and then abruptly released, over and over again.  Well, amazingly, nobody else heard these noises.

There could only be debate, because, there was absolutely no evidence to indicate that Obi was opening doors.  Furthermore, despite withering and intense questioning and cross-examination, Obi would say (or admit) nothing. In faet, even without an attorney present, (or a Cat Local 566 union representative),  Obi would confess to nothing.

Jason’s bedroom door was opened, closed and secured via a handle – not a round knob.  Jason’s door was not unlike the other thirteen doors throughout the house that had the same type of hardware – a brass-looking handle.  Yet, of all the doors with handles throughout the house, mysteriously, only one person made the claim that a cat would open a door – though, Jason admitted, he had not actually ever seen Obi (or any other cat, or ghost or anything for that matter), open his bedroom door. Yet, the bedroom door would be opened.

Months went by.  We dropped the debate and gave up on Jason’s preposterous claim. Yet, every once in a while, when I would walk by Jason’s room in the very early hours of the morning, I could not help but notice that his bedroom door was indeed ajar – and I specifically remembered it being closed when I went to bed.  It was open, and often by only a few inches.  Very strange.  But maybe, Jason sleep walked at night, visited the bathroom, climbed back into bed, and didn’t fully close the door.

Evidence, however, began to turn the tide against Obi and begin to make the case that Jason was, indeed, correct in his assertions.

Jason’s bedroom is on the second floor of this household.  On the first floor there is the “guest” bathroom, which is not far from our front door, the guest bedroom and the formal dining room.  This bathroom has two doors: one towards the rest of the house and another one which opens onto the side-yard. This bathroom, by the way, is my favorite “reading room.” It’s also the official “critter hospital” of the Clary household.  Sick animals (cat, dogs, sugar-gliders, baby-blue herons, etc) are often kept here for recuperation, repair, and physical therapy.

One day, Alice noticed that a baby green parrot was on the ground behind her car.  She noticed that it wasn’t flying and she caught it so that the cats (particularly Luke) didn’t eat it.  After catching the bird, she placed it into our critter hospital – the first floor guest bathroom.

Later, Alice went to check on the bird.  Much to her surprise, she noticed that the door to the bathroom was ajar.  As she entered the bathroom she was even more astounded to find Obi, sitting on the floor, staring at the lttle bird, which had hopped up onto the bathtub rim.  While there was no direct evidence, Alice was beginning to suspect that Obi had – somehow – opened the bathroom door in order to gain access to the bird.  She couldn’t prove it, so Obi was released without having to post bail and on allowed out on his own recognizance.   The bird, meanwhile, continued to convalesce.

In another memorable incident, many months after Jason’s claims about a cat (allegedly) opening doors, I was sitting on “the john,” in the guest bathroom and reading the Sunday newspaper.  For the sake of decorum, I closed the bathroom door that led to the rest of the house (Thank God!).

As I read the Miami Herald that morning, I had to glance to my right as I heard the bathroom door handle suddenly spring up and down.  Cha-chang.  Then, suddenly, the handle went down again and the door opened inwards.  I looked up and wondered who was walking in on me.

I should not have looked up.  There was nobody walking in.  Instead, I had to look down. Walking in, without even bothering to look at me, was Obi.

He walked right past me.  He didn’t glance at me. He just walked right in front of me – with my shorts down around my ankles.   Come to think of it, this cat’s a lot smarter than I ever even could imagine – after all, by looking straight ahead he avoided quite a scary sight!

Obi then casually, and without bothering to ask for my opinion, reached up to the handle of the door that led to the side yard.  He placed both paws on top of the handle and pulled down.  The handle went down, but the spring pulled it right back up – making a “cha-cheng” type of noise.  The door could not possibly be opened, as it was secured with a deadbolt lock right above the handle.  Obi tried again.

And again. And again.

So, I turned the deadbolt so that the bathroom door to the sideyard was no longer locked.

Obi sat still.

Obi studied thought about my maneuver (he admitted this, confidentially to Boo-Boo Tail later), then glanced (finally) at me.

He reached up again, and pulled down on the handle.

The handle went down, and, as it did so, Obi leaned forward, thus placing his weight against the door, and, in so doing: behold – the door opened to the sideyard.

Obi then scampered out.

My mouth fell open!  Until that, is, that I remembered that I was sitting on “the john,” and the bathroom door to the side-yard (and thus the neighbor’s house and the street in front of the house) was wide-open!  I quickly closed the door and formed this thought that remains frozen in my head for all eternity, “Obi Opens Doors”.  It was true.  Obi really, really could, and really did, open doors.  He opened two doors, in fact, right in front of me.  He didn’t even make a big deal about it.

Like I said, this house has over a dozen door handles.  Well, actually we don’t anymore.  This past summer, we were forced to change all of them to “door knobs”.  Door knobs, unlike door handles, cannot be opened by Obi.  He studies these rounded knobs.  He stares at them.  He reaches up and pulls on them, but, unlike the handles, nothing happens.  It is a sad state of affairs for Obi.  But, we had no choice.  Obi, after figuring out that he could open Jason’s bedroom door, then started going around the house and opening ALL OTHER DOORS.  Obi figured out that doors could be opened, and, when opened, doors allowed him to go into a different space.  This was profound.  Obi tried telling the other cats, but, the other cats just sat there or licked themselves (which is what they do when they struggle with concepts beyond their grasp).

If Obi wanted to go outside, all he had to do was “let himself out”.  He did this routinely (as long as we left deadbolts turned opened).  If, however, a door was secured by a deadbolt, Obi would attempt, over and over and over again to pull the handle down and let it spring back up.  Down went handles, up went the handles, over and over and over again. At 2:47 am you could hear door handles being pulled down and then springing up.  You would hear it again at 5:09 am, and at 6:17am- in fact, we were hearing it all the friggin’ time.

Obi had ‘cracked the code’ on doors.  And even if a door didn’t immediately open, Obi would remain “on station” and stare at the handle – take a little break – and then try again. And again, and again, and again.  Incessently, Obi opened (or attempted to open) doors.

This breakthrough for Obi, though was becoming increasingly problematic for the Clary household and our guests.  What began as a mystery and inconvenience for Jason, had turned into an Obi-Kat free-for-all.  For example, Obi would let himself into the garage.  He would hang out there for a day or two and then decide to allow himself into the house.  Remarkably, Obi learned not only to “push” a door open away from him after pulling down the handle, he also learned to “pull” open a door, towards him, after pulling down on the handle.  Thus, if we didn’t deadbolt doors, Obi could not only let himself into a bedroom or a bathroom or a garage, he could also let himself into – or out of – the house, without our assistance.  On many occasion, I would close the patio doors behind me as I walked outside – only to hear the door open behind me and see Obi following me, often playing with his iPod, simultaneously.

Stranger incidents began to occur.  We would have the Grandma’s – or even “Church members” – come by the house for dinner or for Church meetings. Invariably, a guest would need to “visit the facilities” and would be “doing their business” in the first floor’s guest bathroom.  They would be sitting there, quite literally minding their own business, when suddenly the door handle would swing down and they would look up in surprise as the door suddenly opened up on them.  Even more to their surprise, they would have to stop “looking up” as to who opened the door, and, rather, look all the way down to the floor.  They would then see a very determined “Maine Coon” walk through the now opened bathroom door and then just stroll calmly by.  Obi then proceeded to try to open the remaining door to the world outside.  Meanwhile, our house-guest is sitting on the toilet in complete amazement – and a little bit of fear.

This was difficult to explain to guests.  We would advise them to press the little locking mechanism on the door and to ignore the possibility of the door handle swinging down over and over again.  It was Obi, we had to explain.

We also had a little issue with the dog.  Readers familiar with the reputation of “Chewy” know that “Chewy” cannot be trusted around strangers.  Well, he can’t be trusted around the type of strangers that care for their body parts to be remain “whole” when visiting the Clary household.  In other words, Chewy bites.

So, we would “lock up” Chewy whenever guests came to the house.  We would “lock up”  Chewy in the first floor bathroom. But, we had to install a sliding bolt onto the bathroom door, so that Obi would not (deliberately or inadvertently) “let Chewy out to eat the guests”.  I am not making this up.  If that sliding bolt was not closed as to prevent that bathroom door from being opened, then Obi, un-wittingly (or so we would want to believe), would allow Chewy to come out, and, like a very large and very angry T-Rex dinosaur, hunt down and maim and kill guests.

LIke I said, we put up with this for a while until Justin came up with a brilliant “thwart Obi” solution. Justin advised us to replace all the door handles throughout the house with rounded door knobs.

The solution worked, and now, poor Obi, has, once again, has to deal with the (door opening) limitations of his species.  We’ve tried to explain to Obi, sometimes via counseling, that this is “in his best interest”. However, he is very skeptical of our intentions and he just glares at us and begins to spit.

Obi, however, refuses to come to terms with doors that don’t open to his will.  He calmly walks up to the door, with it’s fancy, now-round-door0knob and just stares at it.  Kinda reminds me of the “Yes!” song, that goes something like this, “in and around the lake, mountains come of the sky and they just stand there”.  So, likewise Obi would just stand there and stare at the round door knob.

And then, hope against hope, he reaches up, standing high on his hind legs, his body stretched against the door and his front legs and paws extended all the way up. He then pulls down on the door know with all his weight with his front paws on top of the knob.

And then he tries again.

And again.

And again.