Chapter Two: The Cleanest Cat 2-9

Chapter Two: The Cleanest Cat

Aaron, “The Cleanest Cat” man, washed his cat in the shower and vacuumed that poor cat daily.

Maybe I should mention he washed his cat named Fritz in shower with him, not separately. I

wonder if he felt closer to the cat because of this. I am not making this up, this is true story. I did

not know about the cat when I first met him for coffee. He shared the information with me during

lunch on our second date. The date I should not have gone on. Guess I should have found out

more before I went on that second date. You would think you would learn something new with

each dating experience, but sometimes we forget.

Cat man seemed so normal when we went for coffee and talked. Although I realized later, that I

had paid for my own coffee. Humm… That was not a good start. Signs of cheapness should

not show up this soon. I have this theory: “How it begins, is how it ends”. You buy your coffee

or dinner on the first date and you will be paying for more than half of everything with this person

from then on out. This is just a general theory that seems to have been fundamentally true

throughout my last fifteen years or more of online and personal ad dating.

Aaron seemed like the nicest man, so I was trying to be a little merciful, even with his cheapness

about the coffee? It is interesting to watch, when you first meet a new man for coffee, especially.

if they don’t offer to buy coffee .They certainly are not going to be taking you out to nice dinners.

In Aaron’s case I thought I would give him a second chance. He did drive a very nice and

exceptionally clean BMW and he lived in a very lovely golf community not that far from me. Well

if you consider 75 miles not far. I live in fairly small and slightly rural area in the Pacific

Northwest, so maybe that is considered close to me.

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The up side of where I live, is that I do live in a cute little beach cottage with my own private

sandy beach; an unheard of thing in the Pacific Northwest. We have lots of beaches with lots of

rocks and lots sea weed and lots of muck. So I am very lucky to have that sand and wonder if I

will ever find a man that I will really want share wiggling his toes in it with me. For instance, Mr.

Clean Cat would not want to get sand under his toenails or between his toes, so I am sure there

would have been no sand wiggling with him.

At any rate we talked and had a great time on the coffee date; so he invited me to come see his

new home at lunch time the following week. No, let me rephrase that, he insisted that I see his

house the following week. He was so totally enamored with his house; he was willing to drive and

pick me up and take me there for lunch. It seemed a tiny bit extreme. Lot of driving for only

lunch! 150 miles for lunch, sounds more like somewhere you fly for lunch to me.

I could not imagine he thought I was that special. Little did I know, not only was I not special, he

was just slightly, no absolutely obsessive compulsive. Not just about picking me up, but about

everything he shared with me. I did not know this at the time, but I found that out soon enough!

The second date! Cat Cleaner was friends with very good friends of mine so I allowed him to

come to my home to pick me up in his very clean BMW. With friends in common it seemed to be

a fairly safe adventure.

The day of our lunch date, Aaron arrived exactly on time, not a minute late, and did not comment

on my lack of landscaping in the front of my beach cottage and sincerely seemed to enjoy my

little house. That was nice! My house is clean and neat, but has a lovely assortment of weeds

and dirt and rocks on the way from the garage to the front door. At this point in time I have lived in

the house for two years and have been concentrating on finishing the patios on the water side, so

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I had no flowers on the entry side of the house yet. No lawn, no arbors, just a sidewalk. Maybe I

can finish the yard if a million women read and laugh at my adventures on awful dating in this

book and admit that older women have just as many if not more challenges than the gals in “Sex

in the City”.

When I opened the door to his car it was so clean, I was afraid that I might leave finger prints or

leave one grain of sand from my very muddy rural driveway. I actually thought about taking off

my shoes and putting them in a plastic bag and carrying them in the car. I held my breath and

got in. The car did not explode from my extra dust. You will understand that comment later.

We talked the whole way there about people we knew in common. When we ran out people in

common he told me the best to clean toilets. It is amazing what you can talk about with people

you don’t know at all. I now know how to perfectly clean my toilets, according to Aaron. Not

sure I would really bother doing this much work, but according to Clean Cat man, you put Clorox

in the water, leave it for an hour, come back and scrub with Ajax, then polish with car wax, so

nothing will stick. That was almost worth the date to me. On the other hand, it was almost too

much information. I thought toilets were meant to be cleaned by cleaning ladies. So now if I

ever get in a bind, I certainly will know how to clean a toilet. I am not sure about the car wax, but

who knows?

When we arrived at his home I could not help but notice that not a plant was out of place. It was

the perfect yard. It had the perfect entry. There were no dead-heads (you know those dead

flowers you are supposed to remove), no leaves on the ground, each and every plant was in a

perfect location and perfectly tended. It was almost beautiful. If it had not been so contrived, so

totally organized, so clean I might have appreciated it. But no, I like those wild gardens with

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flowers and plants mixed together everywhere, with all different shapes and sizes having a great

time together. To me it should look like the plants made love together and are hugging each

other, rather than standing totally alone in perfect harmony. This was a perfect harmony yard, not

a luscious sexy yard. Guess we all see it differently! Boy I am glad he did not look closely at my

yard, where the weeds peek out from under beauty bark falling in love with the hydrangeas.

Slowly walking through the faultless yard to the exquisitely manicured front door the Cat Cleaner

told me the scientific name and variety of every plant along the way, how he pruned them, how he

watered them, how he fertilized them and why he had chosen each and every one. Boy did I

wish I had my own car, and we had not even gone into the house yet. Escape was on my mind

or was it boredom. It made me wish I was a much better judge of character at that first coffee

date. I just want to think positively of every one, which must be a character flaw.

Somehow I just kept walking up to that front door, I was starting to get worried about going in that

front door, the utterly polished front door. Would I be able to breathe in the house, or would it be

purified air? I held my breath and removed my shoes, and charged forward wondering if my

socks were clean enough to walk on the incredibly spotless white carpet. Aaron led the way, so I

followed and listened as he described every room and every perfectly placed piece of furniture. I

work as an interior designer and even though I love “perfection” in design, there is big difference

between sterile perfection and magnificent comfort. I would say his home was hygienic

flawlessness and my date was not over yet.

Kind of scary isn’t it. Not scary like you could get hurt, but surprising what you meet when you

date.

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The date went on. I sat in his kitchen and we talked while he showed me all his neatly

organized cabinets. I had never had a man show me his cabinet organization before. I have

had them show me a lot of other things, but never the inside of their cabinets. He even showed

me his garage. There was classic car in the garage, a lot of closed cabinetry, and a desk

complete with computer set up. The desk was flawlessly ordered, no paper or pen was out of

place. I asked him why he had his office in the garage instead of in the house. He and his cat

Fritz lived alone, so had two extra bedrooms. Aaron explained that he did not like the mess of an

office to interfere with the tidy interior of his home. He had a system, where he added a vent

from the furnace in the garage and it made it warm enough to easily work in the winter. Don’t

ask me how it worked, but it must have been filtered and purified enough to make him happy.

After about an hour, a glass of water and a plate of carrots; I asked him if he was still going to fix

me lunch. Aaron told me he did not have any other food in his house. I tried to diplomatically

tell him that I was starving. I really wanted to say it was one in the afternoon, you invited me to

lunch (you idiot) and where was my food, but I didn’t. He asked me to give him a minute and

disappeared down the hallway.

I picked up a two year old travel magazine, the only one to be seen and went out to the patio

followed by Fritz the cat, sat down and enjoyed the sunshine. It was a perfect summer day

wasted with another horrible online adventure date.

Aaron was gone for about thirty minutes. One of my lessons here was to never get in a car and

drive somewhere with someone you don’t really know, no matter how many friends you have in

common. Take your own car!! Have an escape route!

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When Aaron finally came out to the patio, he had showered and changed his clothes. I noticed

he had freshly shaved his head as well as his face. Maybe I didn’t mention that he shaved his

head. I asked him what he had been doing, as if I didn’t know, and he said he had showered so

we could go to the golf club for lunch. He looked perfectly clean before, so not sure why the

second shower, or maybe it was the third or fourth. As we sat there talking, I looked down at his

legs and realized they were shaved too. So in my sort of nice way I asked him if he shaved his

legs. He told me he did not only shave his legs, but he shaved his entire body.

I asked Aaron if he was a body builder, as he was in fairly good shape, and many body builders

do shave their entire bodies for competitions. He said no, but he told me he felt cleaner when he

shaved everywhere. It made me wonder why he did not shave his cat. It might be easier than

showering it every day, followed by a good vacuuming I will share with you that I never had the

opportunity, nor did I care to find out if he shaved everywhere on his body, but I would bet he did.

Thus you meet the obsessive compulsive man. By comparison the rest of the afternoon was just

dull. We had lunch at the club house, and he gave me a ride back home.

He called about once a week to say hello for the longest time, but l either did not answer the

phone, or I was busy.

Lesson: Cleanliness is not always close to Godliness

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The Horrible Awful Men I Met Online or Ten Years of Disgusting Online Dating 2-9