Homer's Odyssey

by Gwen Cooper

• • •

  PATTY WAS INSISTENT that the kitten remain with her a little while longer. She wanted to keep an eye on his stitches, concerned about possible infections. And she also hoped he might gain some weight before being subjected to the tender mercies of solid food and two full-grown cats. “You can take him home in a few days,” she promised.

  I was finally getting my Chairman Meow, but somehow a prefab name didn’t seem right anymore. “You should call him Socket,” Melissa suggested.

  “That’s awful!” I exclaimed. “His name is not Socket!”

  She shrugged good-naturedly. “He’ll always be Socket to me.” I hadn’t had much difficulty in naming Scarlett or Vashti. Scarlett had come to me named already; she’d been one of a litter of stray kittens found by my mechanic, who’d named her Scarlett because she’d been so dehydrated those first few days that she kept fainting. I named Vashti for the biblical Persian queen who’d refused to dance naked at a feast for her husband—the king of Persia—and a group of his drunken buddies. She was banished from the kingdom as a penalty for her refusal, an early feminist martyr as far as I was concerned. That my Vashti had grown from a sad, half-bald bag of kitten bones into an exotic longhaired stunner, who looked a bit like a Persian cat, had been a happy coincidence. I didn’t want to stick this new kitten with something cutesy or obvious (“Ray” and “Stevie” had already been suggested by well-meaning friends as exactly the right name for a blind black cat), but I also didn’t want to hang anything too solemn or portentous on him. He would always be blind, it would always be an inescapable fact of his life, but I knew—even way back in the beginning—that I didn’t want his whole life to be defined by his blindness alone.

  I visited the kitten at the vet’s office often over the next few days. His short life had already been more bewildering than anybody could imagine—I wanted there to be something familiar and reassuring when he finally came home with me, even if it was only my smell and the sound of my voice.

  But I was also still nervous in more ways than I cared to admit. He was mine now—there was no going back from it—but I wanted to see for myself how he got around, how he encountered the world around him and learned to make his way through it.

  So every afternoon when I’d finished work for the day, I would stop by Patty’s office. She would take the kitten from his kennel and set us up in one of the exam rooms, allowing him to roam freely while I sat mostly silent in a corner of the room and watched him.

  I could tell already that he was a tireless explorer. The weight of that plastic cone around his neck, which went before him like the shield of a knight-errant crossing enemy terrain, made it difficult for him to hold his head fully erect. But he almost always kept his nose to the ground anyway. The exam room was minuscule, but not an inch of it went unsniffed. When he encountered a wall or table, his tiny paws would cautiously make their way up its side, an engineer testing dimensions and thickness. The only thing he attempted to climb was the chair that stood in one corner of the room, although a large potted plant that stood in the opposite corner was also fascinating. This was my first instance of using the word no with him; I didn’t want him to end up with a coatful of dirt, or to inadvertently tear the plant to shreds.

  Finally it was the day before the kitten was supposed to come home, and still he was nameless. It seemed as if Socket was in danger of becoming his name by default.

  He needed a name, and it needed to be the right one. So I tried to think of him as if he were a character in a story. His life had already begun as so many of the best stories do—with trials and suffering, miraculous reversals and innumerable obstacles still to be overcome.

  But it occurred to me that he wasn’t just the subject of a story; he was also a creator of stories. Lacking even a concept of vision, I was sure he made things up to account for the world around him. How else to understand a chair that mysteriously appeared to block his path in a spot where only yesterday there had been no chair? What was a chair? Why and how did chairs come to be? And how to explain the omniscience of an adoptive mother who could instantly tell—no matter how silently he crept—the precise moment he was contemplating something forbidden? The fourth time he attempted to climb into the large, dirt-filled pot of the plant in the corner, I issued my fourth firm and unexpected “No!” The kitten’s face crinkled into perplexity. He was, of course, unable to distinguish between “soundless” and “invisible.” I was walking so quietly! How can she always know?

  You think, when you adopt a pet, that he will become a supporting character in the story of your life. But I was beginning to think I was now a character in this kitten’s story. From a struggling single girl, racked with self-doubt and saddled with three cats, I had become an all-knowing and implacable deity, a being of great benevolence and mystery.

  I watched him tentatively traverse that exam room—a landscape so small and, by now, familiar to me, so vast and unknowable to him. He navigated between the Scylla and Charybdis of a table leg and a small bowl of water that had been left out for him. Once he tumbled, face-first, into that water bowl. I snatched him up protectively, murmuring Good kitty, good boy, and he purred, content that the heavens favored him once again. No matter how many times he encountered the wrath of the water bowl, or leapt and misjudged the height of the chair, or ran into a table leg he’d forgotten was there, he persevered.

  There’s a place on the other side of this, he seemed to tell himself, and things I must do there.

  He was a hero on a quest. But he was more than that; he was also the one who created heroes and myths about the gods—for the same reason myths have always been created: to explain the inexplicable. He was Odysseus and he was also the blind storyteller who’d imagined Odysseus, who’d seen life on an epic scale even when he couldn’t see anything at all.

  And then I knew what my kitten’s name was.

  “Homer,” I said aloud.

  He responded with a lusty mew.

  “Good, then.” I was pleased we agreed. “Homer it is.”

  2 • What Do You See in an Eyeless Cat?

  You ought not to practice childish ways, since you are no longer that age.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  DURING THAT WEEK WHEN HOMER AND I WERE FIRST GETTING TO KNOW each other within the sanctuary of Patty’s office, Melissa was busily spreading the news of Homer’s imminent arrival among our circle of friends. The offhand question, “Did you hear we’re adopting an eyeless kitten?” was the kind of thing that was sure to dramatically shift the flow of general conversation, inviting a flurry of additional questions in its wake. “Eyeless? Eyeless? You mean, like, he has no eyes at all?” So it was that, even before he came to live with me, the story of Homer was repeated so often and so identically that it came to feel like an official part of the family legends and formative anecdotes that made up the ongoing narrative of my life—the way, for example, my parents have spent more than thirty-five years relating in the exact same way the tale of how my mother went into labor with me at a rock concert, two weeks ahead of schedule, because “Gwen couldn’t wait to hear all that music.” (Had I gone on to become a rock star instead of a writer, by the way, that story would carry far more dramatic resonance today.)

  It’s true that I still slip into precisely the same language and cadence when telling the story about Homer’s adoption as I did back then. But that’s only because the questions I’m asked haven’t changed at all. I’ve gotten questions about Homer from hundreds of people over the years, and they’re always—always—some variation on the same three: How did he lose his eyes? How does he get around? Can he find his litter box/food/water?

  And yet I never get tired of answering. Not because I’m so fond of talking about my cats in general, but because even though I’ve long since gotten used to Homer’s blindness, I’ve never taken for granted, or stopped being inordinately proud of, how brave, smart, and happy my little boy has turned out to be.

  I was having dinner with a new work-related a
cquaintance recently, and the subject of Homer came up. She had been telling me about her kitten, adopted less than a month earlier, and I regaled her with anecdotes of Homer’s kittenhood adventures and misadventures. I had never discussed Homer with her before, but she found him as interesting as most people do when they hear about him for the first time. Then, out of nowhere, she hit me with a question that stopped me cold:

  “Why did you adopt him?”

  It was a question that might have sounded aggressive or hostile coming from somebody else, as if to say, What could you possibly see in an eyeless cat? Yet the woman’s face was kind as she asked it, her tone gentle and sympathetic. It was a question posed in a straightforward way, with an apparently straightforward interest in hearing my answer.

  And I wanted to give her an answer—one as simple and straightforward as the query had been. But it was a question that I quite literally had never been asked before; for the first time in more than twelve years I had no simple, automatic response at my disposal.

  Because I’d never been asked this question, it had never occurred to me to wonder why nobody else ever asked it. Thinking about it now for the first time, it made perfect sense that nobody would ask why I had adopted Homer, because the answer, on the face of it, seems obvious. Either I’d been so affected by his hard-luck story that I would have been miserable and guilt-ridden if I hadn’t rescued him from almost certain death in a shelter—or we’d so immediately bonded, falling instantly in love with each other from the moment I first picked him up, that I couldn’t have borne to leave him there. I realized that everybody, even the people who knew me best, my family or the friends I’d had for decades, probably thought that those were the reasons I’d adopted Homer.

  And everybody was wrong.

  What I remember most from those first few months after breaking up with Jorge was the overwhelming sense that I’d failed the first important test of my adult life. Everyone, including me, had assumed that Jorge and I would get married. What was the point of spending three years with someone if it didn’t lead to marriage? But one sunny Sunday morning Jorge had informed me, in an entirely respectful and matter-of-fact way, that he wasn’t in love with me anymore.

  If I was honest with myself, I’d have to admit that I wasn’t in love with him anymore, either. I had been twenty-one when we’d met, and at twenty-four I hardly recognized the girl who’d fallen in love with him. She was a scrapbook filled with old photos of someone who looked much like me, with my nose and my eyes, but whose clothes and hairstyle looked more like the girls’ I’d gone to college with than the way I looked now. I’d been vaguely aware—on some not-quite-conscious level—that I was gradually changing, that the things I’d been sure I wanted only three years earlier might not reflect this newer me, whoever she was. But hearing the words I’m not in love with you anymore had struck me like a body blow. What if, I couldn’t help wondering, the person I was becoming wasn’t lovable?

  I was also beginning to have doubts about my career path. Back when Jorge and I had been together, the typically low nonprofit salary I earned had been almost a luxury I’d indulged in, justified by the fact that I was combining it with Jorge’s much larger salary. It was increasingly clear that it wasn’t a salary that could carry me safely into this new phase of my life. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what else exactly I was qualified to do.

  It would be an overstatement to say that I had lost all faith in myself. But I was considerably less confident and optimistic than I had been only a year earlier.

  I’d found it impossible to say no when Patty called and I heard Homer’s story for the first time. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been able to say no eventually—in fact, I’d deliberately left myself the option of turning him down, believing that I probably would. Heartbreaking as Homer’s story was, even I knew that I couldn’t save every animal who deserved saving—I would have told myself that I’d already rescued two cats and was doing the best I could for them. I might have hated making that decision, I might have cried for days the way I used to cry when I came home from volunteering at an animal shelter, but, ultimately, I could have lived with it.

  It’s also true that, when I did meet him, Homer crawled into my arms with a seemingly immediate willingness to love and be loved by me. Even when I was holding him in that moment, though, I’d known that it wasn’t really about me specifically—that if somebody other than me had shown up at my vet’s office, and whispered to him softly, and picked him up gently, Homer would have been equally willing to love that person.

  Sensing that he could have loved anybody as easily as he could love me was actually the first thing that grabbed my heart. Whatever else he might or might not turn out to be, this kitten was a creature with a tremendous capacity for love. The idea of someone having nothing but love to give, yet being unable to find anybody who wanted that love, struck me as unbearably tragic.

  The other thing I realized was that, while he seemed loving, he wasn’t scared or desperate to be loved, the way you would expect a kitten—or even a person—who’d experienced nothing but pain, hunger, and fear to be. Nor was he hostile and defensive, a kitten who’d let a hard life stomp all the love right out of him. He was merely curious and affectionate. It was as if there was some innate source of courage within him, some inborn willingness to engage the world openly and joyfully, that even all the suffering and hardship he’d been through hadn’t taken away from him.

  It was a staggering concept for me at the time. I had been dumped, forced to move out of my home, and was having financial problems—and I’d consequently developed an unfortunate tendency to approach life as if it were a grim struggle, to allow self-pity to consume me whenever I lost some of those struggles.

  But here was this cat, whose ordeals made my own worst days seem like a week at Disney World, and his attitude upon meeting me appeared to be, Hi! You seem goodhearted and fun. Don’t you find that people generally are goodhearted and fun?

  It probably sounds like I’m about to contradict what I said earlier, that I ended up adopting Homer because I thought there was something special about him. It wasn’t that, though. Not exactly.

  What happened was that I caught a glimpse of something I desperately needed to believe in at that point in my life. I wanted to believe there could be something within you that was so essential and so courageous that nothing—no boyfriend, no employer, no trauma—could tarnish or rob you of it. And if you had that kind of unbreakable core, not only would it always be yours, but even in your darkest moments others would see it in you, and help you out before the worse came to the absolute worst.

  Or, as my grandmother used to put it, “God helps those who help themselves.” If I recognized all that within this kitten now, and took him home because of it, then I would be proving my own theory right.

  So I didn’t adopt Homer because he was cute and little and sweet, or because he was helpless and he needed me. I adopted him because when you think you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in someone else, you don’t look for the reasons—like bad timing or a negative bank balance—that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what.

  In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.

  What I’m trying to say is that, when I decided to bring this eyeless kitten home with me, I made my first truly adult decision about a relationship. And, without realizing it, I established the standard by which I would judge all my relationships in the years to come.

  3 • The First Day of the Rest of His Life

  A good woman, Eurycleia, daughter of Ops, guided [him] to his room, and she loved him better than any other woman in the house did, for she had nursed him when he was a baby.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  SCARLETT HAS ALWAYS ENJOYED SLEEPING ON SOFT, CLOTH-Y PILES OF things, like pillows or towels or piled-up blankets. Vashti prefers dozing on hard surfaces. As I left for work on the morning of the day when
I brought Homer home for the first time, Scarlett was napping on a pile of laundry in the back of my closet, while Vashti rested (comfortably?) on top of a wooden desk, her cheek pressed against the sharp corner of a large dictionary.

  They looked so peaceful as they regarded me with their heavy-lidded, half-sleeping eyes that I felt a momentary twinge at the havoc I was about to wreak in their lives. “I’ll see you guys later,” I said quietly on my way out the door. “With a big surprise …”

  Vashti responded with a gentle cooing sound, while Scarlett merely blinked at me once and rolled over to sprawl on her back, all four paws in the air.

  I left work at exactly five thirty that afternoon and headed straight for Patty’s office. Homer had already been loaded into a small purple cat carrier with HOMER COOPER scrawled on a strip of masking tape across the top. I peeked inside, but Homer was all-black and eyeless, and the only thing I could make out clearly was the white of the plastic cone around his neck. Everybody, including Patty, was almost tearful as they waved the two of us off.

  Homer was completely silent during the car ride home. In the first instance of what would prove to be a decade of constant and frequently irrational worries, this concerned me. I hadn’t spent much time around cats growing up, so what I knew of them came primarily from things Patty told me and my hands-on experience with Scarlett and Vashti. And Scarlett and Vashti hated their carriers, screeching like howler monkeys the second I loaded them in—particularly Vashti, who was so unassertive under normal circumstances that she never raised her voice above the level of a squeak.

  It seemed unnatural that Homer was so quiet. It might be that he was simply sleepy, or wearily used to being removed from one place and brought to another for reasons that were, to him, inexplicable. Perhaps he even enjoyed the seclusion of the carrier (Vashti and Scarlett loved to make small caves for themselves in boxes and shopping bags) and found the motion of the car soothing. Or, a dark corner of my mind pondered, maybe he was so terrified at this bewildering turn of events that he was afraid to make a sound. I tried to speak to him reassuringly as I drove. We’re almost there, Homer. We’ll be home soon, little boy.