Tabby’s Place has hosted cats called “Wigglytuff” and “Beans On Toast.”
“Nirvana” is hardly the worst or weirdest of names.
But Nirvana is trying to figure out if he has the wrong name.
He bears striking resemblance to a well-loved flannel shirt. But that is where any likeness to 90’s grunge ends.
Nirvana is as rebellious as a bran muffin. He pushed the envelope once, but it fell off the table, and he apologized for the rest of the afternoon. He does not smell like teen spirit. Most of all, he is incapable of apathy.
He is, however, proficient in anxiety, which suggests he was also not named for that other nirvana.
You could make the case that Nirvana attained paradise the day he came to Tabby’s Place. His previous life was hardly a heart-shaped box.
As one of fifty-plus cats in a sickly colony, he was shriveled and bewildered. Missing patches of hair, he would have benefited from a wig made of Eddie Vedder’s surplus curls. He did not want to stay where he was, but he did not want to go anywhere else. It is hard to think about heaven when you are hungry.
But the gurgling songs of his belly drowned out his fear, and Nirvana entered the trap. He has been walking through open doors ever since, wondering if he hears his own name.
The entrance to Tabby’s Place itself was the first portal.
Nirvana did not know, peeking out from the carrier holes, that he would now be carried forever. His weathered toes touched down on blankets made of flannel and fleece. Weird bald paws skritched his chin and rubbed new rhythms into his scruff. Everyone in sight was a fan. They told him his bald patches were beautiful. They sang in the syntax of salmon.
The door to royal chambers came next. Nirvana would not have seen this coming. Aren’t floor-to-ceiling windows and beds shaped like Hostess cupcakes for classy and cultured cats? In this mean old world, if you want a piece of paradise, you must act like an angel.
But Nirvana’s halo was tilted tin foil. His genre was “unhuggable.” He also produced an impressive volume of, to use our staff’s highly technical term, “snot rockets.” Someone called him “skrunky.”
But in the outpost of paradise called Tabby’s Place, that is a compliment.
The skrunky boy squinted into the sunshine. Nirvana nestled into a suite for cats who are loved for who they are. There were towers draped in terry cloth and days dressed in patience. There were friends from the life before, equally perplexed by all this resurrection.
The silver veteran turned gold in the afternoon sun, drowsing in and out of dreams. Sorrel asked Nirvana if this might be where all the lyrics were leading, the hidden track at the end of the album.
We asked Sorrel if she was Nirvana’s wife, but cats are under no obligation to disclose details. Still, her kittens bore a dazzling resemblance to the cat with the grunge-and-glory name. Actually, so did many of the colony kittens.
I am saying “many” because it sounds more delicate that “just about the whole heckin’ hootenanny.”
We did consider renaming Nirvana “Benjamin Franklin,” but Sorrel informed us that it is a myth that Franklin fathered eighty children. Besides, cats reproduce faster than Founding Fathers. So we will just say “many.”
Meanwhile, Nirvana was passing through one more door.
He was about to become a Community Room cat.
If Tabby’s Place is a parable of paradise, every suite shares in the splendor. But if we had to pinpoint the nougat at the center of this truffle, it would be the Community Room.
The Community Room is where you go when your first draft was ragged and you were written out of the movie with the happy ending.
The Community Room calls your name if you never had a name before.
If you have been in pieces like Gulliver or lost your pastel peace like Patches, you are a Community Room cat. If you are north of twenty like Tux or east of eccentric like Eartha, you are a Community Room cat. If you need the mercy found only on our administrative assistant’s desk, or fourteen pyramids of poultry nuggets a day, you are a Community Room cat.
If you need proof that paradise knows your name, you are a Community Room cat.
You do not need to get your act together before you walk through this door. The Community Room is for cats who have no intention to “act” at all. Nirvana was a natural. The only song he knows by heart is honesty.
The only thing he needs to be is himself.
Perhaps he has the right name after all.