We prefer to compare ourselves to unicorns and poetry, or at least something as honorable as string cheese.
But if we’re being honest, we are the living embodiment of bowling alley bumpers.
We should add this to our résumés proudly.
At tenth birthday parties, bowling bumpers empower every fifth grader to knock down some pins.
At Tabby’s Place, humble humans empower every cat to get back up.
Walk these alleys, and you won’t find one soul unacquainted with gutterballs. The cats wear their “hopeless situations” like porkpie hats, full of beans and empty of shame. Valerie presents her paraplegia like just another stripe on her sweater. Durin‘s dimples don’t drop at the memory of being abandoned.
They have come down lanes of loss, with no loss of dignity.
This is particularly the case for cats who might be rightly asked, “have you no dignity?” I speak of those who bite and brawl, imperial egos with auditoriums of teeth. They are bowling balls on fire, wrecking balls building their own city. People who have never been gutted might say the cats have only themselves to blame, that their own behavior has landed them here.
The cats, particularly the cat named Lornadoone, would say: “Your point?”
There were no bumpers on Lorna’s life before Tabby’s Place, no bouncy mercies to slow her roll. Our sleek silver cannon careened for disaster, too aggressive for most adopters, too semi-feral for the demure.
If you’d never been flattened by your own bad choices, you might cluck at Lorna. “See what happens when you help yourself to hands like hamburgers?”
To which the sparkling cookie would say: “I see precisely what happens. Pass the Hamburger Helper.”
For Lorna’s “mistakes” (let the record clearly state that I do not believe Lornadoone Rosenberg has ever committed a single error in her life) led her to the land of earnest erasers.
Lorna’s “difficult” ways (let the reader understand that I do not believe Lornadoone Rosenberg is anything but easy to adore) hurled her down the alley of the unconditional.
Lorna’s heavy ball of burdens rolled her between bumpers that bellow: “Beloved!”
When you become a Tabby’s Place cat, danger itself gets gutted.
If Lornadoone’s extra ginger could have snapped her safety elsewhere, there’s nothing to fear here. She happens to be softening, her rolling pin unfurling heart cookies when no one is looking. But even if Lorna should nip and growl all her days, she would never strike out at Tabby’s Place. There is always, always, always a spare mercy here.
That’s because we’re in the business of being bumpers.
As long as there’s a Tabby’s Place, no resident will crash into the gutter. Lornas and Durins and all the little faces yet unseen will barrel into softness, bouncing gently into the wide highway of hope. They will get where they’re going. Everyone will sing “Happy Birthday.”
No one need ever feel ashamed.
In the rare hours we remember this, we might even laugh down our own alleys. It’s my consistent experience that Tabby’s Place people — yourself no doubt included — are the most sensitive and humble birds on earth. We have cried in CVS parking lots, and rolled up roads of steaming silence, and echoed down lanes of loneliness.
Sometimes we have knocked our own pins down. We have left undone things which we ought to have done, and done things we ought not to have done.
Someone has probably snarled, “see what you’ve done? You have no one but yourself to blame for that stomach ache/D-minus/broken friendship.”
But someone else, somewhere along the way — perhaps someone feline — has lay down like a bumper.
Someone has saved us from our own sadness or scaredness or salty snapping teeth.
Someone has softened our story, until fear itself was in the gutter.
And so we do the same.
Fear not, snappy cookie. You are wreathed in smitten bumpers, and everywhere you roll is home.