Charles is not a minimalist.
Charles is not a streamliner.
Charles is a keeper, a hoarder, and a master of disorder.
And Charles loves being Charles.
While we’re busy tying ribbons, Charles is tearing open packages. All the packages.
The shiny red box that makes a sloshing sound when shaken: Charles is convinced there’s cream of pterodactyl soup in there. (Charles dreams big.)
The jangly green cylinder with little bows on the ends: Charles has it on good authority that therein lies the ultimate toy, one jingle ball to rule them all.
The unassuming gift bag with teeth marks on the tissue paper: Charles did that, because Charles believes it contains actual human hugs, and Charles can’t get at them fast enough.
Charles can’t do much of anything fast enough for Charles’s liking, because Charles has taken a liking to everything.
If ever a cat was gift-giddy, this is our gentleman. Ever since the stark streets undumped him onto our hearth, he’s been turning over every box, bag, and buddy for the presence of presents. This is an inexhaustible odyssey, but fortunately Charles is incapable of exhaustion.
(The same cannot be said for his neighbors, who have requested Ambien for Christmas, administered directly into Charles’s cream of pterodactyl soup.)
But you can’t blame Charles, and you can’t help but want to be Charles. In the years before his Tabby’s Place holiday, his life was a chronicle of unkeeping.
He could not keep a roof over his head.
He could not keep a friend on his side.
He could not keep the night from nibbling the tender tissues of his life, leaving fang marks all over his heart.
He could not even keep consistent hours, not when every hour was spent scrimmaging for survival.
But everything changed when Charles became a child again. At Tabby’s Place, every cat becomes a child again. And children are kings and queens of keeping.
They want to keep all the stuffed animals, the cats and dogs and wallabies and walruses.
They want to keep all the aunts and uncles and meemaws and peepaws around the table, together.
They want to keep traditions and treasures, tendernesses and triumphs, like getting Peepaw Al to keep making armpit farts until his aging armpits are exhausted.
They want to keep everything good, simultaneously, gaudily, greedily, and their wide little eyes can see the good in everything.
And everything comes down to being kept.
To be a Tabby’s Place child is to be kept, and Charles has caught onto this quickly. He parades through our promises, grabbing sweetness like streamers, glorying in the grease and grace of each day. (These are, in feline cosmology, mutually reinforcing sacraments.)
Living inside the Tabby’s Place promise — “all we have is yours; all you are, the sloppy and the shining, is ours; all the love is real” — Charles lives unafraid, which is more than one can say for most adults, senators, or pterodactyls.
But how can you be scared when you know, down to your candlewicks, that you’re safe?
How can you worry when you trust, with every twinkle (Charles contains universes), that you’re held?
How can you lose sleep over what you can’t keep, when all your ribbons and ridiculosities are completely kept?
Charles wants to keep everything he’s collected — your hugs and my kisses, the cheese shreds and the neon mice, Derby‘s peepaw affection and Tucker‘s cranky-uncle exasperation. But Charles can hold it loosely, because Charles knows that good grows, even when good changes, even when good and grief get baked in the same gingerbread.
I can’t help but want to be Charles.
While we’re scouring articles like “Snoop Dogg’s Secrets to a Lasting Marriage” and “How To Keep Your Poinsettia All Winter,” Charles is keeping company with the symphony.
Melodies he loves will rise and recede, as friends get adopted or volunteers move to Kalamazoo or salmon shortages plague the nation. Not even Charles’s strong child-paws can keep everything.
But Charles can keep the beat, because Charles keeps the faith that good chases good. Kept by the promise, Charles can’t be afraid. Kept as our child, Charles can delight even in disorder, chasing ribbons and mysteries all over the floor.
Charles can’t keep everything, but Charles can’t lose.
And if we can keep up with Charles, Tabby’s Place just might turn us into children again, too.
Children can cry over the empty chairs at the table, the broken little boats and the stories that end too soon. Children can wail that the blueberry pie has been completely consumed. Children can turn downright dastardly when their cries of “do it again!” are met with “Peepaw really needs a nap, honey.”
But children and cats — particularly electricats like Charles — keep on.
In the arms of the promise, Charles knows he’s a keeper. That’s bad news for bad news, which has little power over safe creatures.
May we all be safe creatures this winter.
May we be shameless maximalists.
May we collect all the mercy-ribbons and memory-bobbins.
May we hug Charles repeatedly, and feel ourselves hugged like wriggly gifts.
May we keep on.