“Saving cats from hopeless situations” means a multitude of things.
It means making a blanket nest for a kitten who looks like feathers and bones.
It means taking an old cat from the bend in the road where his strength ran out.
It means five thousand pounds of kitty litter a month.
It means bulk-ordering chicken in its solid, liquid, and aqueous state. (And when they invent aerosol chicken, you can be assured we will obtain that for our cats, too.)
But most of all, it means removing every reason for worry.
Worry has its place, of course. Worry is a dialect of love. But worry is only meant to get you into the carrier to the party. Love will drive the rest of the way. Worry is not on the guest list.
With more colorful sprinkles than a birthday cupcake, Phoebe looked more festive than she felt. Outdoor life calls for vigilance. Worry was the static under every song.
But two living candles — we will call them Warm and Wonderful — conspired to celebrate the calico. They gave the speckled stray a name and lavished her with care. They filled her belly and emptied her fears. And when their impending move turned Phoebe’s safe haven into a “hopeless situation,” they wielded worry like a torch in the dark.
Warm and Wonderful’s worry would be short lived. When love plans the party, worry has the life span of a mozzarella ball in the Tabby’s Place lobby. (The Mozzarella Ball is also the name of the lobby cats’ spring formal.) By dint of their devotion, the doomed stray made her debut at Tabby’s Place.
At that moment, reasons to worry dropped to zero. But Phoebe did not see the confetti fall. It is one thing to be technically safe. It is quite another to believe it. No one can force you to taste the frosting on your own Welcome Home cake. No one can convince you that the wish you made so many years ago, the one you never told anyone about, has just quietly come true.
No one can command a cat not to worry.
But we can steal her reasons, one by one.
Having only ever trusted Warm and Wonderful, Phoebe was wary of the peculiar party people who populate Tabby’s Place. For all she knew, our cooey, gooey voices were just softening her up so we could eat her. (We are, after all, the species who invented Is It Cake?, a program devoted to making non-cake objects look like cake.) Or we might put her back outside. Or we might put her in cargo pants. Or we might…we might…
…worry has more “reasons” than our laundry room has blankets.
But love has more patience, and the game is afoot.
Since worry is a wily foe, we depend on stealth sweetness. First, we would take down Phoebe’s fear of hunger. Little paper boats of tuna are no small thing when everything is overwhelming. She might not trust our intentions, but she couldn’t deny that dinner came on time.
Next came the careful comfort of good health. Neither children nor calicos put “a well regulated thyroid” on their birthday list, but Not Feeling Lousy is a five-star gift. Hyperthyroidism affects many cats of a certain age, and a simple daily pill keeps them well. But how to medicate a guest of honor with a host of fears?
Worry may be a decent imitator, but love is a better inventor. Worry does a mediocre impression of wisdom, while love is busy building something better.
Something like a “Safety Stick.”
If we were going to keep Phoebe healthy, we would need to knock worry off the table … or the tallest bookcase at Tabby’s Place, as the case may be. Our campaign against fear included nestling Phoebe into one of the sweetest, calmest, coolest venues at Tabby’s Place. If you want to throw a birthday party for a celebrity, you book the Las Vegas Sphere. And if you want to throw an every-day-is-your-birthday party for a real superstar, you put her in Jonathan’s office.
(Ringoes, New Jersey: the Vegas of the boondocks.)
Jonathan’s office is heavily armed against worry. It is equipped with a solarium for soul-mending sunbeams, a 2-3 cat limit for acclimating introverts, and a Jonathan for assuring you that he founded Tabby’s Place with you in mind, and he would have done it all even if you were the only cat in the world.
Jonathan’s office also contains a bookcase no cat has ever scaled before.
But this is Phoebe’s party, so she gets to plan the games.
Which brings us back to the happiness of health, and the invention of the Safety Stick. It may resemble a pair of popsicle sticks glued together, but this wand is magical when it comes to medicating Phoebe. She may hiss or lunge, sulk or cringe, but she cannot stop our staff from daintily dabbing medication onto her ear flap.
Defeated worry #592: pilling an unpillable cat. Pills can be compounded into a glorious goo that gets where it needs to go. Phoebe can get what she needs, regardless of whether she wants it.
And with the first-floor fears kicked out the door, we can begin work on the stickier sorts of worry.
If Phoebe worries that we will torture her with touch, she will learn that love has no expectations. Our goal is not that she curl like a gift bow in our laps. Our mission is that she feel peace, whatever that means to Phoebe.
If Phoebe worries that the supply of safety will run short, she will find that fear is the only endangered resource at Tabby’s Place. We are here to learn her soul and build a world around her. All she needs to do is tell us what makes her feel loved. We can translate slow blinks or airplane ears accordingly. We will write a new language, together, in the icing of unconditional acceptance.
If Phoebe worries that we are going to keep singing badly in her vicinity, that fear is valid.
If Phoebe worries, our work is not done. “Saving cats from hopeless situations” means rescuing them from everything that ever made them afraid. This party perseveres. We are single-minded and Phoebe-minded.