A Truly Fearless Feline
Homer
A Truly Fearless Feline
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ShareGwen Cooper, the author of Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned About Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat, understands that expression very well, and was able to see it, or intuit it, even in the case of her tiny black cat Homer, who was abandoned as a kitten, suffered from a terrible eye infection, and had his eyes surgically removed before he was ever able to see the world at all.
Homer’s Odyssey is the exceptionally touching story of this seemingly hopeless case and how, after Cooper adopts him, he not only triumphs over his blindness (which, of course, being a cat, he isn’t even aware he suffers from) but learns to snatch flies out of mid-air merely by tracking the buzz. Further, he very likely saved Cooper’s life when an intruder broke into her New York apartment, and later survived being left alone in that apartment for several days in the chaos following 9/11.
Homer’s blind patience during the period when Cooper couldn’t get back to her apartment, located near Ground Zero, is what any animal would have done. But what Homer does to that intruder is extraordinary:
…for a split second I was worried for the burglar’s safety…(w)ith a loud hiss that bared his fangs (prior to this, I’d always thought of them as “teeth”), Homer thrust the whole weight of his body forward and brought his right front leg into the air, stretching it up and out so far that it looked, bizarrely, as if the bone connecting his leg to his shoulder had come out of the socket, held in place only by muscle and tendons. His claws extended even farther (good God – how long were those claws?). Glinting like scythes in the lamplight, they slashed viciously at the man’s face.
That’s a little cat we’re talking about.
Homer’s journey from foundling kitten to fully functioning cat is a lovely little story. It’s very difficult to imagine how a cat with no eyes could navigate around an apartment to begin with, but Homer has to contend with multiple moves to different apartments as Cooper struggles to gain traction in her career and her personal life. With each move, of course, Homer must relearn the apartment’s topography and sniff out, echolocate, and memorize all of the little obstacles that litter his path. And Cooper also owns two other cats with normal eyesight; Homer is never able to understand why he’s never successful in stalking them when, of course, he’s in plain sight all the time.
Then there are all of Cooper’s friends, dates and boyfriends. One date arrives at Cooper’s apartment to find Homer waiting at the door with one of her tampons hanging from his mouth, the “whiteness of it (standing) 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.”
(This reminded me of my worst date ever, with a beautiful young PR professional named Mary whom I was entertaining at my apartment when my two cats at the time simultaneously experienced attacks of diarrhea. Things hadn’t been going too well to begin with, because I had been babbling all evening out of nervousness, so at this stinky juncture, Mary went racing out of my apartment at hyper-speed. I couldn’t blame her a bit, but I Googled her name recently and discovered that she’s now, of all things, a professional dog trainer, and is perhaps more patient than she used to be about animals and their extraordinary capacity to embarrass us.)
But Homer is hardly ever a burden in Cooper’s telling. He is an uncommonly loving cat to begin with, and sleeps every night with every point of his body pressed up against Cooper. But affection, as rare as it might seem to non-cat-lovers, is only part of the package. Homer, all three pounds of him, is also a hero and role model. As Cooper struggles with the drifting indecision so typical of twentysomethings, Homer, who likes to scale floor-to-ceiling drapes and leap blindly (well, of course blindly) from floor to furniture and back again is inadvertently inculcating in her something she hadn’t known she lacked: The ability to act decisively and irrevocably in the face of the unknown.
Think how hard merely walking from place to place would be for you to do if you were suddenly stricken with blindness, but with Homer, “(I)t 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.” Later, as Cooper contemplates whether or not to risk a wonderful friendship with a man by declaring her love for him, she realizes, from Homer’s example, that “sometimes, to get the things that were good in life, you had to make a blind leap.”
This lesson might sound a bit banal out of context, but remember, this blind leap is not a metaphor; it is what Homer actually did every day. Every day, as well, Cooper went through substantial difficulties to care for this cat that others counseled should be put to sleep after the infection had robbed him of his eyes. There is no banality at work here; Homer’s story, and Cooper’s as well, is replete with the challenges and triumphs of a life that is fully engaged and of a love that has been well and fully realized.
I genuinely believe that higher animals on the order of dogs and cats live their lives as humans do, as a series of choices. An animal’s choices are more constrained, because they don’t choose whom they get to live with, and they are ruled to a somewhat greater degree than we are by instinct, but that instinct (or, as in Cooper’s description of Homer, those innate qualities) are not the sum total of an animal’s life.
When Seamus was five or six, his angry tugging at the leash in order to experience more of life was a choice; there was nothing essential to his survival in deciding he wanted to explore farther reaches of our neighborhood. And when he went on his food strike, that was a choice, too, just as it was my choice, both before and after the strike, to feed him chunks of Colby and Swiss and eight-year-old cheddar.
I made those food choices out of love, because Seamus didn’t need expensive cheese to survive, and to a lesser degree I made them out of guilt, because I shared Seamus’ avidity for life and felt bad that I hadn’t always walked him as much as he would have liked. I felt even more guilt because, when he was young and would dart straight towards a speeding truck, nearly yanking my shoulder out of joint in the process, I responded, on a few occasions, by slapping him on the muzzle, and did the same a few times when he soiled the rugs. It is probable that he’d long since forgotten these punishments; I have not, and never will.
But even if at some level he remembered these remonstrations, I think Seamus knew he was a cherished part of our family. Near the end, when he would take 20 minutes or more to get up our stairs so that he could guard us as we slept, there was unquestionably some duty and some instinct involved.
But, like Cooper’s Homer, he wasn’t only id. That look in his eyes, as he rested, panting on the landing, and steeled himself for the final ascent of his endless odyssey? It’s the same thing that Gwen Cooper saw in Homer, even though, of course, he had no eyes. What we saw was love.
