When is a birthday more “miracle” than milestone?
When the odds were against it … but the oddballs of love rolled up their sleeves.
It has been a historic summer.
The United States of America turned 250 years old. Scrabble the tabby turned one year old. Both events would have once seemed impossible.
What apple-pie-eyed optimist would expect a newborn nation to stick together for two and a half centuries … or a blind orphan kitten to see his first birthday?
Forgive us if we save our best fireworks for the purring pioneer. For, Scrabble’s own body, no bigger than a chili dog, has survived more bitter battles than North vs. South or soda vs. pop.
Four score and 287 days ago, Scrabble’s 0th birthday was nearly his last. Motherless and brittle, he was swiftly departing before he even arrived.
We are blessed to have a staff both gifted and tenacious, and we have coaxed many newborns across the Grand Canyon from death to life. In the tender hands of Director of Operations Danielle, Scrabble had hope. We assumed the “usual” heroics would usher him into the happy hootenanny of healthy kittens, merrily adopted with no memory of their broken beginnings.
But even as the stars aligned to save him and his tabby stripes wriggled for rubs, Scrabble flagged behind “normal” kittens. He would not grow, topping out around 24 ounces, scarcely a bottle of soda pop. (A six-month-old kitten should weigh 5-8 pounds.) His gait was not merely kitten-clumsy but lumbering, except when it was perfectly normal. And as soon as he opened those green-apple eyes, it was clear that Scrabble was blind.
Survival seemed as fragile as newfound freedom.
But at Tabby’s Place, something louder than the Liberty Bell rings for cats who fall through the cracks.
The Linda Fund was Scrabble’s anthem of hope.
Your Linda Fund donations turned into declarations of love for our tiny teen tabby. If you gave to last year’s Linda Fund, you personally assembled a dream team of brilliant specialists to tackle Scrabble’s puzzle. You nursed him through scary sieges of sickness that had no easy explanation. You refused to declare him difficult and hunker in the bunker of “hopeless.”
You saved his tiny life, repeatedly.
And even when all signs pointed to a difficult-to-diagnose, devastating storage disease, you provided mercy in the mystery.
Meanwhile, Scrabble’s dream was as bold as it was simple. All our littlest citizen wanted was a steady supply of tomorrows. Every “today” tasted so good, he could not wait to have another. Foster mom/angel Danielle lived to lavish him with love, wearing him swaddled near her heart if she even went to the store. She and her partner Dan delighted in Scrabble’s every jubilant corkscrew leap after a wand toy, or his tiny snores from inside Dan’s cozy boot.
Scrabble, the Rhode Island of kittens, felt larger than the all the land.
When you know you are loved, you are invincibly enormous.
But as the specialists reminded us, Scrabble was anything but invincible. Storage diseases are notoriously cruel, with a “universally poor prognosis.” There is not (yet) a cure. A first birthday might be too much to ask.
The birthday boy did not get that memo.
He is proceeding as though, in fact, the best is yet to come.
So go ahead and call us greedy for hope.
Then wish Scrabble a happy first birthday with a donation to the Linda Fund.
Your donation will be doubled. Your next cat will be here soon, frightened and fading.
And your love will engrave the word “miracle” into every impossible milestone.
We are bold enough to dream of more birthdays for Scrabble, but brave enough to treasure each day as The Great Day, the one day that matters. Love is its own sovereign nation. Today is the birth of possibility.