Happy New Year, Royal Family!

I hope 2025 is off to a gentle start for you.

Our beautiful queen is a fan of New Year’s. Prescott sees how everyone has a shimmer in their eyes, a brief belief that they can begin again.

She likes this. She wishes we could hold onto it all year.

But, being both great and good, Queen Prescott is going to do more than wish.

She is going to help us.

She will start by admitting that hope can be hard sometimes. Even Prescott, whose molecules are made of mirth and mercy, knows about the blues. They come out of nowhere. They may even come from your own bewildering body.

Just this month, Prescott developed a painful urinary tract infection. Incontinent cats are prone to such nuisances, and Prescott has generally been spared. But, the whole kerfuffle made it more difficult than usual for our staff to express her bladder and colon. This meant Prescott had to be restrained for longer than she prefers (her preferred restraint duration being the length of one hug).

Prescott is not embarrassed to admit that she was frustrated. She even thought about having a conniption fit. (She realized she does not know exactly what that is, although it sounds serious.)

But before she could entertain the idea of getting grumpy, Prescott picked herself up. She galloped down the hallway, directly past her own Do Not Let Prescott Down The Hallway sign. She recruited Hips into a wild rumpus, racing and chasing and exhausting both of their guardian angels.

She remembered that she is Queen Prescott, and life is pretty luscious even on a bad day.

This may have had something to do with the antibiotics that cured her infection, but I think that was just a coincidence.

Regardless, you will be pleased to know that Prescott has completely recovered both her health and her dignity. Thank you, dear sponsors, for ensuring that our queen’s needs are met, whether they be medical or metaphysical.

A New Year, for Prescott, is a doorway into fresh miracles. She is raring to taste and see all that 2025 can do. Kiss Prescott from head to toe, and you will not find one atom of fear. She may never forget her days of sorrow, but she does not live there anymore.

This does not mean everything is easy.

The door to the New Year may have opened, but another door refuses to yield to Prescott’s powers. This is the door to the Food Hallway. Silly creatures like humans call it Quinn’s Corner, but Prescott knows things by their real names.

(For instance, your real name is Intergalactic Wonder Angel. Your driver’s license is incorrect. Prescott has spoken.)

Prescott knows that (A) the Food Hallway is on the other side of the “Quinn’s Corner” door. Prescott knows that (B) we love her. But Prescott cannot force these facts to compute.

If (B) is true, there should not be an uncooperative door. There should be, at most, a fringe of groovy beads, like people hung in their doorways in the ’70s. Those would be fun to gallop through, without limiting access to infinite bayous of wet food.

You know there are infinite bayous of wet food over there, right? Well, now you do, because Prescott told me, and I’m telling you.

How else to explain the parade of red-and-white French fry dishes filled with giblets and pates, and sometimes even something called “savory cheese shreds?” When the door is open, lunches appear. When the door is closed, cats must wait entire minutes, languishing for lack of after-lunch lunches and tailgate dinners.

In the words of Prescott’s second favorite musician, Tom Petty, “the waiting is the hardest part.”

But being a proper New Jersey girl (with apologies to her birth state of Rhode Island), Prescott’s favorite musician is Bruce Springsteen, and so there is hope. Prescott has it on The Boss’s authority that “nothing matters in the whole wide world when you’re in love with a Jersey Girl.”

Since (A) every living creature at Tabby’s Place is in love with Prescott, it follows that (B) it does not matter if Prescott bolts down the Food Hallway, even though she is “not allowed.”

Maybe hope is not so hard after all.

Prescott’s eyes are two green gazing balls, and everywhere she looks, hope and kindness are looking back, smitten. I get emotional watching her. Whether she is clowning, conked out, or comforting me about something she understands without my even telling her, Prescott is fully alive.

We will never take her for granted, this merry miracle cat who is forgiveness on four legs.

In fact, I propose we celebrate New Year’s every day of the year, for Queen Prescott.

Dear sponsors, you are the heart of Prescott’s hope. Thank you for your unconditional love and generosity. How blessed we are to enter each new day with you by our side.

Love, your correspondent,
Angela