Should we purchase a crocheted mermaid tail for one or more of our paraplegic cats?

Does Guillermo know that he shares a name with at least one delightfully cool individual?

Do we want a revolution, a revelation, or just a vat of vanilla ice cream?

These are the questions we ask ourselves at Tabby’s Place.

Which leads me to a question for youze guyze. How are you doing? How are you really and actually doing?

Feeling a little scattered?

Finding some doors in your mind freshly open, then walking into concrete walls and trying in vain to peek into locked gardens?

Has your brain been inconveniently doing its best impression of society, dressing like a ninja (if ninjas wore masks emblazoned with Spongebob) and trying on the costume of “normal” even while feeling so very, very, profoundly abnormal? Are you daft and dizzy and asking questions that don’t have answers?

Welcome to the post-lockdown, pre-opening, incendiary yet understated, tense yet plodding days of summer 2020.

We’re betwixt and between, aren’t we, kittens? Things are still stranger than a platypus in a leotard, but we’re all doing our best to get with a program we can’t read.

Which brings me to Guillermo.

Gazing upon Guillermo, you immediately notice two things: (a) he looks like Bucca‘s long-lost love child and (b) he looks pretty confused.

He is neither.

OK, short of Maury Povich manifesting in the Lobby to conduct a maternity test, we will never know about (a) with any certainty. But be assured: Guillermo is not gobsmacked by our new, gnarled, tremor-torched reality and its daily revolutions.

Guillermo has gone through too much in his brief life to be too overwhelmed by anything, despite what his naturally-anxious eyes may tell you. Born on the streets; shuffled into Tabby’s Place as a wobbly teen; adopted, then returned years later; Guillermo has tasted summer’s sweetness and winter’s chill.

He is greater than the weather.

So why does Guillermo, for all his glorious deep-down peace, still and always look kind of like…well…a dingus?

Simple: because he wants us to feel less alone.

Guillermo, all Bucca-nosed and blessed, may be at greater peace than he shows. But, in his tentative tiptoeing and hesitant hops into the future, he takes us by the hand and nurtures us, dinguses all (dingi? I’ll have to research that). There is something strangely comforting about a cat who seems to “get” us in these days of uncertainty and anxiety and scattershot questions without answers.

I will never be one to say that “all good things come to an end.” If anything, they grow and mutate (most good things are, in fact, mutants of some kind, e.g. hip-hoperas, cauliflower rice, you, me). Nothing truly good can ever cease to be.

But Guillermo’s glorious, grace-giving time at Tabby’s Place has concluded, and in the best possible way. Not only has he been adopted; he’s been adopted and adored and embraced exactly as he is by one of our stellar staff members.

In the words of history’s greatest hip hopera: there’s a grace too powerful to name.

Which brings me to one last matter. I’m afraid it’s gravely serious. It seems the beloved staff member who adopted Guillermo — let’s call her Mama G to protect the guilty — has seen fit to deprive Guillermo of his name. Sure, she’s given him a new name that is utterly awesome (Ari!).

But.

In so doing, she has stripped Guillermo of the opportunity to share a moniker with this national treasure:

Is there any justice?

Maybe not in this life, but we’ll celebrate anyway. Congrats, Mama G and GuillAri. And thank you for delighting all of us dingi so deeply. Your love transcends the questions and uncertainties and returns us home to what lasts.

More Blog Posts