Someone should alert the local authorities.

Tabby’s Place is the epicenter for an event of international significance. Foreign dignitaries, captains of industry, and captains of starships are due any hour.

Today is our Prescottversary.

It was one year ago today that Queen Prescott, the Great and Good, arrived at Tabby’s Place.

This requires us to suspend our instincts. We know, in the river beneath our ribs, that there has never been a time before Prescott. She has seen the uncreated light. She helped to finger-paint earth’s first aurora. She was on the committees that agreed that brontosauruses and Guy Fieri and string cheese were a good idea.

Surely, she knew the world before a single cruel word had yet been spoken.

How else to explain Prescott Power?

How else to accept that January 25, 2023, was the most wonderful and most terrible day of all?

On this Prescottversary, it’s easy to lose the pathos under all the pomp. We had trudged through most of January, but were we living? When we closed our eyes on the 24th, we could not dream of how our lives were about to change. We could not know that January 25 would be the most wonderful day.

We cannot remember how we lived without her. We cannot fathom that she came to us. Our silver sibyl is here. She could have Paris. She could have all seven seas. But the sweetest spirit on the surface of the earth is at Tabby’s Place, loving us.

She does tumbling runs for the sheer joy of our love. She hurdles Hips, our Lobby’s great white rhinoceros. She knows she is an oracle, but she holds her mysticism lightly. She gallops with the giddy and dotes on the despairing. She is empathy in a cloak of glitter, the caretaker to the caretakers. She stares into our eyes as though she has found the reason she was born.

But we have seen that stare before.

On January 24, we were innocent. We had not seen a silver cat disappearing like a vapor. No nightmare had prepared us for the pain of earth’s gentlest girl. No eye contact had gripped our hearts like the gaze of the dying Prescott.

We cuddle in the comforter of forgetfulness, but Prescott was dying on January 25th. She knew this, and she spent her final strength making deliberate “muffins” in the air, paws as rhythmic as a psalm. She stared into each of our eyes, willing her love to land. She had nothing left to give, and she gave us her love.

This is Prescott Power: the love that outlasts, outlives, and outrages the darkness.

The emergency veterinarians gave us no hope. You know the story: Prescott’s injuries were “incompatible with life.”

Prescott and life had a separate agreement.

Prescott and life have been doing deals ever since. They rearrange the alphabet and the architecture, installing skylights on the face of the dark. If all your love letters have fallen to the floor, and you cannot find one line of poetry, report to Prescott. Whether she is feeling silly or sympathetic (her twin core competencies), she will write you a new sonnet. Whether in your arms or galloping infinity signs around your ankles, she will unplug the terrible from your day.

How can she love our species so much, when one of our own inflicted such agony?

I don’t believe Prescott has forgotten January 25, 2023. She cannot run from the reminder in her own tail. It hangs limp as linguini, never again to fly high as a pennant.

Prescott has not forgotten. She has simply built her queendom under another flag. She has seen the abyss, and she has seen the light, and she has chosen where to fix her gaze.

She is too busy basking in the wonderful to take trips to the terrible. She is revered as a queen by legends in scrubs and blue jeans. She is alive in a time of veterinary excellence and squeeze-poultry. She has been united with the noble noodlehead who was destined to be her great love.

(I will let the reader decide if I refer to Hips or myself.)

(I will remind the reader that, if you are noble enough to be a noodlehead, you are Prescott’s great love.)

Formally, Prescott was born c. July 2021. I will play along with this, but I’m not really buying it. Prescott precedes us. Prescott waits for us. Prescott promises that there is life abundant in a terrible, wonderful day.

More Blog Posts