It’s a song oft-sung at Tabby’s Place: “Insert-Cat-Name-Here had a dental today… …and there were multiple extractions.”
I’ve lived enough lives to know: you do not need to fall prostrate before anyone who begins sentences with, “In the final analysis…” If it’s final, it’s not much of an analysis. And if it can be analyzed, it’s not a living mystery (e.g. you, me, the cats, the trees, the stars, Paul Rudd).
If you’ve ever sobbed your way through Charlotte’s Web, you are familiar with the tender mind of E.B. White. Heartfelt children’s author, gifted New Yorker editor, and co-author of a definitive volume on writing style, ol’ E.B. is sadly underappreciated for his greatest accomplishment. E.B. White is Extra Bonus catlike.
Catching me in the throttling throes of grief, a well meaning person once said, “well, I hope you’re a little less sad each day.” I told her that I earnestly hoped the same. But you know and I know that’s not how sorrow works.
Place your hand on your heart. Place your heart on the line. Find your place in the great symphony of things, and tell me: do you have it all once-and-for-all-ed up? Flash…does not.
The world is weeping. Our brothers and sisters are shuddering in subways, crawling across borders, bearing their children and their grandparents and their ragged animals on their backs. Are we supposed to bask in jolly cat happenings at such a time as this?
We think we need a guarantee. What we get is a friend and a new morning. And then we get to do it all over again.
Not everything that happens is good. Loss lurches across all of our borders. Stores continue selling high-waisted jeans. Mumford and Sons refuses to make new music. Diagnoses drag us through canyons of mud. But everything that happens has the prefix “Professor,” if only we’ll show up for class.
I do not regret to inform you that things are not getting worse. I repeat: the situation is not deteriorating rapidly. Kids these days are not kidnapping all that is good and right. All of us kids are going to be alright.
We’ve gone and done it again. By the time you read this post, the odds are we’ll have done it several times. We don’t regret a single one.