If you need help with quantum physics, Shakespearean sonnets, or folding a fitted sheet, you had best find someone brilliant.
But if you’ve misplaced your astonishment, and you can’t find it anywhere, you need more than brilliance.
You’re in luck. Tabby’s Place is the epicenter of Jilliance.
When an ordinary day is your quest, Jilliance is your answer.
Suite E’s kinetic jackrabbit is our Jill of all trades. Built like a bendy straw in the milkshake of the moment, Jill is what laughter would look like if it took feline form.
She is the wildly waving hand of the front-row fourth grader who knows all the answers.
She believes in extra credit and extra cheese.
She knows the way from the floor to the landing pad of your collarbone, and from agony to ecstasy. And she knows the way back, so she can pick up any gloomy grumpkins who got lost along the way.
Jill sprints into the back hallway of Tabby’s Place from a sheer excess of aliveness. If most of us only use 70% of our own muchness, Jill vaults past 100% before her first bite of breakfast. She wants maximum muchness for everyone.
Your melancholy is her mission. Your shoulder is her pulpit. If you sludge into her room wearing the grey gauze of worry, expect a black-and-white cat to color outside the lines of your frown.
She will lacquer your lap with herself, like a one-cat mural reading all shall be well and all shall be Jill. She will follow you like the scent of paradise’s pizzeria.
When Jill looks at you, even her nose smiles. I do not know how she does that, but we are dealing with Jilliance.
Jill will not rest until all beings are whole, healed, and bouncy with the eternal boing-boing of the blessed. Jill will probably not rest even then. After all, existence is astonishing. She feels a personal obligation to tell the others, especially if they are in the back hallway.
That is also where the aliens are going to air-drop the interstellar mozzarella when they get here, and Jill does not want to miss that. I told you she was more than brilliant.
But, like most noble geniuses, Jill wears her wisdom lightly. She is what old timey folks would call a “skinnymalink,” all noodle-bodied and wriggly. One eye droops just a smidge, as though she is stretching to admire everything under the heading of “everything.”
She has the head-tilt of the incurably curious, and the fuzzy hearing of a grandpa who left his Miracle Ear upstairs. She is fully aware she is a miracle.
She is also recovering from losing her marbles.
If you ask Jill, marbles are overrated. Give her meatballs. Give her cool river rocks that look like faces. But don’t worry about losing your marbles. “Marbles” mean control, all cool and faceless. Marbles are sad nuggets without the benefit of chicken. They were never ours to keep. None of us is in control, which means we have more time to be astonished.
Besides, some marbles are downright anti-marvelous.
Consider polyps. Polyps are angry nubbins that plunk themselves in a cat’s middle ear and throw a pity party. Their bad mood radiates in pain and infection. And, although Misery Marbles, would be a bangin’ name for Berry and Willow’s post-punk clarinet band, the misery marbles called polyps are not welcome on our premises.
So, when Jill came to us with ears full of troubles, the Jilliant needed the brilliant.
Our little luminary got a date with a stellar specialist, gifted in a procedure called a ventral bulla osteotomy. Make that a double-header: Jill’s polyps were so preposterous, she would need surgery in both ears, with a delicate recovery after each.
There would be a donut collar resembling an actual strawberry donut.
There would be more squeeze treats than you can fit on a spaceship.
There would be gentleness, giblets, and Jilliance at every step.
Because, although marbles thud like hailstones, mercies bounce higher and higher — like the GPA of the Jilliant, or the boing-boing of a ping pong ball, or the feet of a cat who scales shoulders.
Existence is astonishing, you know.
And if ever you misplace your astonishment, the cat who lost her marbles will be looking for you. Most likely in the back hallway.
Correction: don’t look in the back hallway for Jill, for she is boing-boinging with bliss in her very own forever home as you read these words!