We get disappointed.
Cats get surprised.
This is the difference between us.
By the time we are two digits of age, human beings make many unwelcome undiscoveries.
Our master plan to enchant the entire five-star restaurant by putting olives on our ten fingers is not well received.
Contrary to obvious expectations, adults do not have pizza parties every night just because they can.
In direct opposition to the documentary film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a shockingly low proportion of the population is proficient with nunchucks.
We get sad and cautious and restrict our adult dreams to comfortable slippers and coupons for Hot Pockets.
Cats get curious and creative (while fully respecting all dreams pertaining to Hot Pockets).
CAT has every reason to be disappointed.
Not only did he have to take a reverse road trip down Forever Home Freeway, but his Uber driver dropped him in SUITE. Not only was he born with a bum THING, but his friends are getting adopted, and the kitchen seems to have misplaced his order for quail omelet.
Not only is CAT not disappointed, he’s made it his career to keep everyone else from getting disillusioned.
While pragmatic persons hang yellow lights and “yield” signs, CAT is a prismatic person with no intention of yielding to “reality.” Reality is a formality. CAT is a waking dream set on taking charge.
Things are going precisely to plan.
Since coming back to Tabby’s Place, CAT has commandeered the nerve center of SUITE, which is to say CAT2’s heart.
CAT2 is a messy, stormy bowl of cheese if ever there was one. CAT2 does not even claim she would be in a milder mood if given a messy, stormy bowl of cheese. CAT2 is simply CAT2, as absurd and necessary as sunrises and sausages and hymns and hootenannies.
CAT came back and set his hootenanny straight on CAT2’s heart.
And CAT2’s heart split open like a Cadbury egg.
This was nobody’s expectation, but creamy, dreamy things happen when you’re open to surprise.
Like most prismatic persons, CAT is a typhoon of eccentricity, a tycoon in the currency of quirk. Let down by life, he won’t let up on loving life. When his plans get nibbled, he gets back in the kitchen and makes enough macaroni salad to share (with extra to glue onto cool art projects).
CAT has simply never met a day unworthy of his joy.
CAT’s joy is larger than luck, larger than choice, larger than childhood itself.
But CAT is serving up his sweet secret hourly, his selfless heart born to share.
The secret is simply: surprise.
When your dream returns you to the dream store, dream again.
When your adopter says “eh,” remember how much you loved Tabby’s Place.
When your mother tells you to take the olives off your fingers, ask the waiter to send the stranger across the restaurant a single olive from the gentleman in the Osh Gosh B’Gosh coveralls.
When your plans or your blinkered body or your friends flick your soft heart, remember that someone may brush you this afternoon, and someone else may provide poultry, and someones of a thousand kind faces exist out there, and who can tell how many of them have yet to love you?
If you’re CAT, you’re confident of this: neither disappointment nor dairy shortages can keep you from spending every day of your wild, wealthy life on love.
What better way to surprise a grey and grizzled world?