Have you ever watched a cat turn acrobat in his sleep?
Unaware, for once, of his own powers, he arcs like elbow macaroni. He spreads his arms as though he’s trying to hug the horizon. He joins synchronized swimmers from some celestial deep end.
His whiskers laugh at their own jokes. His eyelids tell you his secret: he is dreaming.
Cats all dream, as we do. But only those who wriggle get to remember.
Tom should not want to remember, not if he’s reading the standard script or running his little bean toes over the ordinary atlas of a dreamscape. His past tangles more easily than his own hair.
There was a person back there somewhere, perhaps even people. There were moments of real connection, when cat eyes and human eyes cross the lake of language and splash each other with understanding.
There was love, which is either the best or the worst thing to remember.
Love remembered may be bread for the road. If it ended in “au revoir,” “until we meet again,” it did not end at all. It is a locket jangling around your neck, making melody with the rhythm of your feet. Love remembered can keep you going.
But love remembered may be salt in your wounds and your tears. If it ended unhealed, your cloak is torn and lets in the cold. If it ended in a hard cat carrier, with a lengthy note about your many ailments, it dissolves into smoke that makes you cough. Love remembered can keep you heartbroken.
Or you can keep dreaming.
We cannot know why Tom’s people only walked so far. We can glimpse the gold leaf between his storybook’s torn pages. Someone once marveled at his Persian-mix eminence, dangling smitten from his billion billowing hairs. Someone once cared enough to do combat with his kidneys, inside agitators doing Tom harm at just six years old.
Someone adored him enough to write “severe asthma” on the last love note. They surrendered him, but they did not surrender the dream that Tom might go from love to love. They turned around and left him in the glow of red taillights, then dark, but his heart did not turn cold.
His heart, a shaggy Muppet deserving its own variety show, became one with the dream.
So, the continents split like saltines, and Tom did not know where he was. He knew who he was! He was Tom, and he was a cat, and he has never gotten over the fact that he gets to keep both gifts forever. Do you have any idea how glorious it is to be either Tom or a cat? Have the authorities been properly alerted to the fact that one grand little man is both?
So, love’s former face fell behind a cloud. Love is a doodler, and faces abound! Tom took to Tabby’s Place faster than you can say, “is that stuffed animal purring?” He carries sketches of our staff and volunteers and visitors and the dishwasher repair man in his many pockets. (Let the reader understand: if Tom were a garment, he would be cargo pants.) If he has met you once, he will carry you in his hulking heart forever.
If he has loved you for an instant, he will never lose you.
He is Tom, he is a cat, and he is now a Tabby’s Place cat. Which is to say: he will never lose.
The regular reader might say that Tom has already lost so much. His health is knotty. His future is so foggy, our headlamps fail, and we can only feel our way forward with one hand, the other continually petting Tom.
But Tom dreams.
Tom closes those cavernous eyes and swirls in his sleep like a sea cucumber. He rests only so he can open them again, wide to the real dream. He is a sea captain, anchored on the continent called Unconditional. He adores cats. He adores people. He adores the Voyage of Being Tom. He is the sum total of every kindness, and he keeps them all safe in his (massive) cranium. He cannot lose.
As Team Tom, neither can we.