Age can make you outrageous.
Age should make you outrageous.
But I have a feeling Buster did not wait for senior status to become sensational.
We can’t confirm this, having only met Buster at age seventeen. It’s conceivable that he was once as mild as oat milk. It’s conceivable that his favorite color was beige, and his pick for movie night was The History of Silt. It’s conceivable that Buster was once a law-abiding citizen.
No. I can’t lie to you. I can’t conceive of any of the above.
The new kid in the Lobby is too thoroughgoing a hooligan to have come by his hooligannery recently. You can’t convince me Buster ever waded through the waters of blandness and caution. You won’t convince me he once looked before he leapt into the rapids of the ridiculous. You shan’t convince me that he is seventeen years old.
Therein lies his crowning mischief. We shall return to this in a moment.
But first, I shall answer your objections. Buster, a post-juvenile delinquent? Do we speak of the same cat?
I hear you. You are pointing helplessly at the mellow vanilla milkshake who has left you hopelessly in love. Buster is equal parts Tom Hanks, Mister Rogers, and your grandpa in his best suspenders. Buster is the cumulus cloud shaped like a heart.
When Buster fills your lap, you can watch your Calm-o-meter rise in real-time. When Buster meets your gaze — which he does, with unusual intensity even for his ultraviolet species — you can see your own reflection become beautiful before your very skeptical eyes. When Buster requests a poultry cookie, you contemplate contacting the Smithsonian or NASA to report the first recorded instance of feline manners.
And I mean to tell you that this cat is wearing his baseball cap backwards, playing Beastie Boys CDs while Grecca is trying to sleep, and trading his tapioca for Tabasco?
Come on, now. This is Buster, well-behaved as a butter sculpture. This is Buster, the one cat at Tabby’s Place we could trust to guard a butter sculpture. Buster is humility and integrity and “excuse me, pardon me, may I make use of your lap if it’s not too much trouble?”
I hear you, and I answer: Buster is triumphant trouble.
Buster is a jester and a jokester and a hundred laughing hyenas in one dignified bisque body.
I offer you irrefutable proof. Buster believes he can convince us that he is seventeen years old.
This is not comedy, it’s farce. This is not whimsy, it’s the Theater of the Absurd. Just look at him. Are we really expected to believe that this exuberant individual is a day over two?
Now you understand. You see it, right? Buster is clearly younger than the Twinkies in your cupboard. There are no slushy footprints in his snow, no wrinkles on his white Oxford. He rivals the entire US Gymnastic Team for energy.
He is the middle schooler pouring talcum powder in his hair, putting on his grandpa’s suspenders, and telling everyone he is elderly.
He is the goofus so giddy with himself, he wrecks the joke by laughing amid the telling.
He is a child. He is our child. He could even be Prescott‘s secret child. And he keeps telling us he is an aged, ancient, venerable, honorable ancestor.
Hooligannery, I tell you.
There’s just one thing. Clearly it’s a forgery, or Buster paid some scampish vet many poultry cookies to play along. But our snow-imp’s vet records do, in fact, indicate that he was born in 2006.
It’s just not possible. This is not a seventeen-year-old cat. This is a young cat.
Unless both things are possible at once. (I did not come up with that one on my own. That came from the greatest mind of Tabby’s Place. No, not Jonathan. Prescott.)
Can this moon-faced little man be new and full all at once?
Can you be weathered and above the weather?
Has earth’s most honorable hooligan come to educate us?
Is grandpa getting more glorious with age?
Is the best ancestor always still an imp?
Although we can confirm Buster’s age, I still can’t fathom it. But we can be assured of one thing. He is still younger than the Twinkies in your pantry.