Homer's Odyssey Read online

  For Laurence, always

  All strangers and beggars are from Zeus.

  And a gift, though small, is precious.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  FOREWORD

  BY PATRICIA KHULY, VMD

  WHEN I FIRST SAW THE KITTEN, HE WAS A MINUSCULE BIT OF BLACK FUZZ cupped in a young woman’s outstretched hands. No different from any other kitten, it would seem—that is, until he raised his head and emitted an impressive yowl for a creature only four inches in length, tip-to-tail.

  Tiny though he was, he turned to the sound of my voice. That’s when I saw his eyes. This two-week-old foundling was clearly suffering from a severe infection that would surely take his sight, if not his life.

  The well-meaning couple who’d found him practically begged me to euthanize him immediately. Despite their entreaties, I performed a careful physical examination as the kitten struggled, legs flailing, and mewled vigorously on the stainless-steel exam table. Finally, I announced that the kitten seemed perfectly healthy—if you discounted his ocular condition. Would they consider adopting him if I was able to treat his infection?

  For a long list of reasons, the couple could not provide a home for such a young kitten. They worked. They had a dog. They didn’t have the money. And what were the chances that he would ever be able to see again, anyway?

  Oh … none. No chance. I explained that I intended to surgically remove his eyes to save his life.

  I’m pretty sure that’s when I lost them. Shaking their heads in disbelief, they elected to sign him over to my care. His pitiable cries probably pushed their decision along the path of rejection—they were convinced he was suffering terrible pain.

  After his owners agreed to give him up, he was mine to treat as seemed in his best interests. I still had my doubts, but they were laid to rest once the source of his immediate discomfort was revealed: hunger. A small bowl of cat food mashed with milk replacer stifled his cries. He was peacefully asleep within minutes, sealing my decision to treat his eyes, never mind the blindness to come.

  After all, I thought, this kitten had never had the benefit of sight. Unlike human babies, cats are born with their eyes sealed to the world for ten to thirteen days. This two-weeker’s relatively long-standing infection had almost certainly prevented any emerging vision. Once treated, he’d be blind without ever missing the sensory capacity for sight. Like many animals, kittens are capable of rerouting their neurologic faculties for successful survival through a process called individual environmental adaptation—my fancy term for “I refuse to put him to sleep.” How could I renege on my duty to alleviate suffering if I could maintain a life worth living?

  Ask any young, idealistic vets, and they’ll likely confess to the same kind of sin I committed the day this blind kitten came my way. If the animal is afflicted yet healable—and even remotely adoptable—It’s meant to be, we reason. They’re the ones who always strum our heartstrings with their astonishing survival skills and irresistible ugly-duckling potential.

  I knew there was no way I could keep a blind kitten in my toddler-, allergy-, and big-dog-inhabited household. Yet I certainly couldn’t let a vigorous kitten die over a pesky little issue like homelessness. Someone in my circle of friends and family will doubtless find him as appealing as I do, I rationalized. He’d find a home if I could just find someone with the requisite mix of eccentricity and empathy to take on a “special-needs” case.

  What followed were a couple of weeks of rejection after rejection. I enlisted my family, an animal-loving clan who dutifully spread the word of the blind kitten in need of a safe home. I placed ads and sought out vet school friends with a penchant for the pitiful. None of it yielded any potential takers.

  By this time I’d dispensed with all my rationalizing and self-flagellation. The kitten had bounded back to life after surgery—so much so that my staff and I were irretrievably in love with him. There were days I really couldn’t bear the thought of parting with him.

  How could I help but be smitten with his scraggly little blackness, his tiny sunken sockets, his insatiable appetite for feedings, pettings, cuddlings, and play sessions? Yes, he even romped like a normal kitten, despite his eyelessness. In short, he was eminently lovable … at least by all standards except the one with which most humans preoccupied themselves: his appearance.

  Finally, one young woman with two cats of her own who were treated at my practice promised to have a look. But when I finally handed my dark furball over to this prospective owner, I felt a twinge of trepidation. Would she look at him with disgust the way others had? Demur due to an inability to take on such a strange and disabled thing?

  Instead, she whispered gently to him. She picked him up and held him. He purred in her arms. To my surprise and utter relief, she earned my eternal gratitude when she said, “I’m taking him home.”

  Homer was the first “hopeless” case I’d taken on in my then-short career. Though I’ve had many more since, his was the seminal experience, one that ultimately paved the way for so many others.

  Homer’s “odyssey” will doubtless mean different things to different people. But for me, Homer will always be an intensely personal reminder of what veterinary medicine can pull off when it’s infused with the idealism of youth. He’ll always remind me that there’s nothing a partnership between a veterinarian, a loving owner, and one fighting patient can’t achieve.

  Homer’s story is one for all of us to live by.

  PATRICIA KHULY, VMD, MBA

  Dolittler.com

  Miami, Florida

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD BY PATRICIA KHULY, VMD

  PROLOGUE The Cat Who Lived

  1 Socket to Me

  2 What Do You See in an Eyeless Cat?

  3 The First Day of the Rest of His Life

  4 The Itty Bitty Kitty Committee

  5 The New Kid

  6 Don’t Be Happy. Worry.

  7 Gwen Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

  8 The Ballad of El Mocho

  9 “Dogs and Cats, Living Together …”

  10 Running on Faith

  11 A One-Bedroom of One’s Own

  12 Pet Sounds

  13 Lord of the Flies

  14 Mucho Gato

  15 My Homer/My Self

  16 Cats and the Single Girl

  17 “The Pussy Galore Tour”

  18 Cool For Cats

  19 A Hole in the Sky

  20 September 12, 2001

  21 None So Blind

  22 A Canticle for Vashowitz

  23 Intimations of Immortality

  24 Reader, I Married Him

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE • The Cat Who Lived

  Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who traveled far and wide …

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  THE ROUTINE WHEN I GET HOME AT THE END OF THE DAY IS ALWAYS THE same.

  The ding! of the elevator is the first cue to sensitive ears that my appearance is imminent, and by the time my key hits the lock I hear the soft press of paws on the other side of the door. I’ve found that I tend to open all doors—even those in other people’s homes—with enough caution to prevent any furry miscreants from tumbling outside. Rather than seeking the floor, however, it’s only a matter of seconds before those paws have found their way from the door to the front of my legs, and a tiny black cat makes his best effort to shimmy his way up my body as if I were a tree trunk.

  To prevent injury to either my clothes or the skin beneath—his claws are small, but highly effective—I squat down with a cheerful “Hi, Homer-Bear!” (A nickname given when he was a kitten on account of his glossy black fur, like a grizzly bear’s coat.) Homer takes this as his cue to jump onto my knees, placing his front paws on my shoulders and rub
bing his nose against mine with much loud purring and a series of short, clipped mews that sound uncannily like the yips of a puppy. “Hey, little guy,” I say, scratching him behind his ears. This sends Homer into veritable convulsions of delight, and—no longer content with mere nose-to-nose contact—he presses his entire face to my forehead, sliding it down to my cheek and back up again.

  Squatting in the high heels I typically wear (I’m only five foot one, but I refuse to live life as a short person) is even more painful than it sounds, so I pick Homer up and deposit him back on the ground, rising to my feet and finally entering the apartment I share with my husband, Laurence. Keys, coat, and bags are quickly stowed away. When you live with three cats, you learn that the best way to prevent fur accumulation on the clothes you wear publicly is to change into knock-around-the-house garb immediately upon arrival. So from there I head to the bedroom and make a quick change.

  A fuzzy shadow trails my steps through the apartment, leaping to the tops of any and all furniture along the way. Homer jumps effortlessly from floor to chair, from chair to dining room table, then back to the floor again, like Q*bert on speed. As I make my way from the living/dining area to the hallway, Homer’s up on top of a side table, then hurls himself recklessly to the third shelf of the bookcase diagonally across the hall, perching for a precarious moment until I’ve passed. Then he’s down on the ground once more, zipping along ahead of me and occasionally, in his enthusiasm, running smack into one of my other two cats until he reaches the doorway to the bedroom. Stopping at precisely the same point each time, he pauses for an infinitesimal moment, then cuts a hard left through the bedroom door, as if he were drawing a large capital L. He jumps to the top of the bed, where he knows I’ll sit to remove my shoes, and crawls into my lap for another round of purring and face rubbing.

  This routine is the same from day to day. What changes is the closer survey of the apartment I take once I’ve changed clothes. Homer is a creature of many and varied hobbies, and it’s hard to know from one week to the next what new projects he’s decided to immerse himself in.

  For a while, his goal seemed to be setting the world record for number of items pushed from the top of a coffee table in a single day. Laurence and I are both writers, so we have the usual writers’ effluvia—pens, pads, and scraps of paper with notes we’ve taken—scattered among the magazines, paperbacks, tissue boxes, ticket stubs, sunglasses, matchbooks, breath mints, remote controls, and take-out menus. One day we came home to find our coffee table swept entirely clean—books, pens, remote controls, and all, spattered across the floor like a Jackson Pollock canvas. We restored the items to their rightful place (not without a certain amount of shamefaced tidying up), but this pattern continued for several weeks. We weren’t sure which of the cats was our phantom housekeeper until the night I came home and caught Homer in the very act, quivering with pride at his accomplishment and wholly unrepentant.

  “Maybe he’s objecting to the clutter,” I suggested to Laurence. “It’s probably disconcerting for him to have everything in a different place whenever he jumps up onto the table.”

  Laurence isn’t as prone as I am to examining the hidden motivations of our pets. “I think the cat just likes pushing things off the coffee table” was his reply.

  We’ve also learned to tie closed the sliding closet doors in our home. It’s apparently easier than one would think for a small cat to hoist the full weight of his body up a hanging pair of jeans (denim being a nice, sturdy material that’s well suited to climbing), then propel himself onto a top shelf where boxes of old photos, wrapped birthday and holiday gifts (which make a delightful crinkling-paper sound when they’re clawed open), and comfy piles of soft clothes make their homes. Garbage cans—no matter how tall—can be leapt into and toppled onto their sides. Scratching posts made of coiled rope can be completely unraveled, given enough persistence. Bookcases can be scaled and hardcovers hurled from their highest shelves. The same goes for records, CDs, and DVDs stacked in an entertainment center. With enough imagination, the acts of general mischief and minor destruction that one small cat can discover over the course of an average workday are endless. If there’s one valuable life lesson I’ve learned from Homer, in fact, it’s the importance of finding worthwhile projects to occupy one’s time.

  Most recently, Homer has trained himself to use the toilet. Why, at twelve years of age, he suddenly chose to add this feat to his bag of tricks, I couldn’t tell you. I’ve heard of cats being trained by their owners to use the bathroom instead of a litter box, but I’ve never heard of a cat taking the mastery of this particular task upon himself.

  The first time I discovered his latest achievement was by accident. I awoke early one morning and stumbled into the bathroom. Flipping on the light, I found that it was … already occupied, Homer balancing on the edge of the toilet seat.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said automatically, still half asleep. It was only after I’d left, considerately closing the door behind me, that I thought, Wait a minute …

  “Our cat’s a genius!” I gushed to Laurence later that day.

  “When he teaches himself to flush, he’ll be a genius,” Laurence replied.

  It’s true: The art of the flush is still beyond Homer’s grasp. So checking toilets is another item I’ve added to the mental checklist I go through when I get home at night, while I survey the apartment for overturned picture frames, pried-open cabinets, and knocked-over knickknacks.

  Because I never know exactly what to expect when I walk in the door—and because seeing Homer can be a startling sight all on its own for the uninitiated—I try to prepare guests when they visit for the first time. In the years since I met Laurence and stopped dating, and as I reach an age where the number of new friends I make becomes fewer, this is something I’ve had to do with less frequency.

  Still, I remember one occasion when I failed to give a new boyfriend the rundown before a first-time visit. At the outset of the evening, I hadn’t expected to invite my date back to my apartment. By the time the decision was made, talking about my cats seemed like the sort of thing that might kill a romantic mood.

  Homer, in those days, was particularly enamored of playing with tampons. Having encountered one by chance, he was fascinated by the way they’d roll around, and by the string at the end. He liked them so much, he figured out where I kept them stored in the cabinet below the bathroom sink and—with unerring patience and accuracy—mastered the task of forcing open the cabinet door and raiding the tampon box.

  When I walked in with my date, Homer ran to greet me at the door. And there, hanging from his mouth, was a tampon. The whiteness of it stood out against his black fur in vivid, mortifying relief. He scampered around in gleeful triumph for a moment, then promptly ran over and sat expectantly on his haunches in front of me, tampon clutched between his jaws like a dog with a rawhide bone.

  My date looked taken aback, to say the least. “What the … is that a …” He stammered for a moment, before finally managing, “Did something happen to your cat?”

  I hunkered down on my heels, and Homer happily climbed into my lap, dropping the purloined tampon at my feet. “He’s fine,” I answered. “He doesn’t have any eyes, is all.”

  My date appeared staggered by this piece of information. “No eyes?” he asked.

  “Well, he was born with eyes,” I explained. “But they had to be removed when he was a kitten.”

  THERE ARE SOME ninety million cats residing in roughly thirty-eight million U.S. households, according to Humane Society estimates—and so, in a sense, Homer is entirely typical. He eats, sleeps, bats around crumpled-up balls of paper, and gets into more trouble than I can keep him out of half the time. And, just like any other cat, he has very fixed opinions when it comes to what he likes and what he doesn’t. Happiness, in Homer’s world, is tuna fresh out of the can, climbing anything that can support his weight, pouncing with mock ferocity on his two unsuspecting (and much, much larger) sisters, and napping i
n the patch of sunlight that falls into the living room just before sunset. Unhappiness is being the last of my cats to score a prime spot next to Mommy on the couch, a litter box that isn’t immaculately clean, permanent denial of access to our apartment’s balcony (blind cat, high ledge—it’s easy math), and the word no.

  But Homer looms larger than life in my imagination, and I often think his story can only be thought of in epic terms. He’s the Cat Who Lived—an orphaned, half-starved stray who survived an illness grave enough to take his eyes at two weeks of age, and who nobody wanted to give a home to once it was clear he would pull through. He’s Daredevil, the famed Marvel Comics superhero who lost his sight in an accident while saving a blind man, but who gained superhuman use of all his other senses. Like Daredevil, Homer’s senses of hearing and smell, his ability to map and negotiate all obstacles in an unfamiliar room simply by walking through it once, border on the preternatural. He’s a cat who can smell a single flake of tuna fish from three rooms away, who can spring straight up, five feet into the air, and catch a buzzing fly in midflight. Every leap from a chair back or table-top is taken on faith, a potential leap into the abyss. Every ball chased down a hallway is an act of implicit bravery. Every curtain or countertop climbed, every overture of friendship to a new person, every step forward taken without guidance into the dark void of the world around him is a miracle of courage. He has no guide dog, no cane, no language in which he can be reassured or made to understand the shape and nature of the hurdles he encounters. My other cats can see out of the windows of our home, and so they know the boundaries of the world they inhabit. But Homer’s world is boundless and ultimately unknowable; whatever room he’s in contains all there is to contain, and is therefore infinite. Having only the most glancing of relationships with time and space, he transcends them both.