Cat détente

An abandoned young cat found us a few weeks ago, and after the inevitable failure of a multi-pronged campaign to find his owner, the rest of the family besieged me to keep him. The only two dissenting votes were mine, and that of Max, our pre-existing cat.

Max has behaved much like a middle-aged TV star, threatened by a younger, more youthful starlet. He's forced himself into acting more cute and playful around us, while exhibiting a thinly-veiled hostility towards Oreo. Oreo, for his part, has tried to remain non-threatening towards Max, and acknowledge him as alpha-cat. I've sought to reduce tensions by providing two litter boxes, two food bowls, and showering each of them with reassuring attention and affection. They now co-exist for hours without incident, much like People's Republic of China and the USSR in the 1960s. Perhaps I'm the Henry Kissinger of cats.

Speaking of ol' Hank, my wife Betsy insists that his accent is fake. She thinks that he affected it in his youth, playing on the American presumption that anyone with a German accent (and lacking a toothbrush mustache) must be smart (cf: Albert Einstein). She's heard him speak German, and he's terrible. Also, she tells me that his older brother speaks English largely indisinguishable from native-born Americans. Since it's harder for older children to pick up a new language, how could the younger brother have a thick accent while the older lacks it? Didn't they both escape from the Nazis and move to the US at the same time?

My wife ... queen of the pointless conspiracy theories.