Working at Tabby’s Place, your heart is a jingle ball.

Your friends will get adopted, and you’ll be slammed into the baseboards, ringing “oh no! Oh yes!”

Your friends will pass away, and you’ll splinter into shards, wondering if you can ever sing again.

Your friends will become your best friends, and you’ll be grateful you are Life’s favorite toy.

As you know, our best Matthew McConnaughey impersonator, Gator, was plucked from my office a mere month ago. He demanded Texas-wide skies and hourly barbecue, but we negotiated him down to a private solarium and promotion to Director of Operations. Jingle jangle, my girlish heart still peals for him.

But lest I be left bereft, the saints and angels saw fit to send Denali to the Development Office. A tsunami of starlight and stripes, she did the wave and crashed the fundraising party. Jingle jangle, friendship filled the airwaves again.

Trouble is, friendship is not a hostage situation. Selfishness pops all the balloons. If you love someone, you will let them party. If you love an adoptable cat, you may have to part. Jingle jangle, Denali sprinted up the mountain to her forever home, and I bawled at base camp.

But there’s no whining in love. Only jingling.

Summer 2023 had a new game for my bouncing heart, and the catcher was named Rashida.

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve met Rashida. She was the Lounge’s seventh-inning stretch, a calliope of kindness with wild mascot hair. (With apologies to Gritty, Tabby’s Place has the world’s sportiest muppet.) She was all the colors of Cracker Jack, with her eyes on the prize.

Then everything went dark.

Rashida, our most dignified diabetic cat, was struck with ocular issues. We consulted a world class animal vision center, but there was only one option. To save our friend, we would need to remove one eye. Her vision in the surviving eye would be minimal, if that. The entire game changed overnight.

Rashida’s Lounge became a screech of shadows, with Fenek — Fenek! four hundred years old and partial to Neil Diamond! Fenek! — picking on our quilted queen. This could not go on. Rashida deserved dignity, and delicacy, and friendship.

Rashida deserved the position of Development Director.

And so it happened that Rashida Rosenberg became my roomie.

I loved her before, of course, shnoogling those Koosh-ball cheeks and asking her to teach me grace. But if you’ve ever had a friendship that became a best friendship, you know the sound of the bells. It happens to you like grace, like birth, like a gift you cannot earn. Like laughing wind chimes from another world, bonds jingle and jangle. All at once, someone you already loved becomes someone stitched into your soul.

Rashida began chirping, crooning, mapping the room in her proud pantaloons. I sang back. She bonked her nose into my underbaked sugar-cookie heart and left a little dibbit. She told me her favorite song is “The Rainbow Connection” — you know, the Willie Nelson version. She stretched out to the full length of contentment.

I swear her tie-dyed popcorn hair has grown three inches.

I swear my gratitude to Life has written thirty new verses.

I swear friendship is an inexhaustible mystery, and nobody cries alone at base camp.

Jingle jangle, all who love will love again. Jingle jangle, you have not yet met all the best friends of your life. Jingle jangle, you have a friend in Life.

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