Homer's Odyssey

12 • Pet Sounds

A servant presently led in the famous bard Demodocus, whom the muse had dearly loved, but to whom she had given both good and evil, for though she had endowed him with a divine gift of song, she had robbed him of his eyesight.

—HOMER, The Odyssey

HOMER HAD A MILE-LONG TO-DO LIST AS WE SETTLED INTO OUR NEW home. There was a whole new floor plan to memorize, and I ensured that Homer would learn it in relation to his litter box by placing him there first when I released the cats from their carriers. After an hour of hugging the walls as he ran from room to room, he had the layout down cold. There were also new hiding places to be discovered and claimed, new furniture to be climbed and categorized. The apartment was filled with moving boxes, and Homer personally inspected each and every one. He excitedly shredded and tossed paper wrappings, plastic bubble wrap, and Styrofoam popcorn, until the air around him resembled the chum you see in the water after a piranha attack.

Homer loved to climb into the boxes and leap out from them unexpectedly. He had never been as successful at hide-and-seek as he now was with the boxes to provide well-concealed hiding places. He would hunker all the way down, making sure the flap of the box was closed over his head, and spring out like a Jack-in-the-box when Scarlett or Vashti or I walked past. I don’t know if he connected the actual invisibility of hiding in a box with his previous failed attempts at “sneaking” up on the three of us in plain sight. But there was now a satisfaction in the game he’d never found before, and I wound up keeping a few boxes around for weeks after they’d been emptied, unwilling to deprive him of such an easy source of happiness.

Homer also made it his business to greet all deliverymen or phone and cable technicians who passed through our front door. Scarlett and Vashti would hide—Scarlett not caring to meet new people, and Vashti perfectly happy to meet new people but terrified by the noise these men made bumping into things with heavy crates, or rattling metal tools around in a toolbox.

Homer was fascinated by these visitors for the exact reasons, and to the exact degree, that Scarlett and Vashti avoided them. They were new and they made interesting sounds! Where Scarlett and Vashti flew from any noise that was too loud or too unusual, Homer was invariably drawn toward it like a compass needle spinning north.

You would think that a blind cat would be more, not less, intimidated by sharp or sudden sounds, that they would be less comprehensible to him than to other cats. But in a world where no sound was expected—where you couldn’t see the book about to thud on the floor tumbling from the bookshelf, or the vacuum cleaner that would soon begin its wail being pulled from the closet—then no sound was unexpected, either. Sound, in fact, was the thing that explained most of Homer’s world to him. An unanticipated noise, perceived as a potential threat by Vashti and Scarlett, was for Homer one more puzzle piece that made his unseen universe comprehensible. He found comfort in the rhythm and pulse of sound, no matter how jarring or abrasive, the way my other two cats did in silence.

It was Homer’s habit to trot closely behind the men who arrived with a clanging metal bed frame or several feet of television cable that dragged noisily on the floor. Frequently, I had to keep Homer—who was eager to poke his nose and ears into whatever mysterious things they were doing—at heel, so he wouldn’t interfere with their work. Most of them would regard him in a friendly enough manner, although the inevitable question always came up after a moment or two of puzzled scrutiny.

“Something happen to your cat’s face?”

“He’s blind,” I’d answer shortly.

“Aw, poor little guy.” Homer, knowing that this sympathetic tone was directed at him, would leave my side to climb up their legs or jump into their laps. He often dragged along his stuffed worm (whose recovery from the moving boxes he’d been very anxious about), hoping to engage one of these strangers in a game of fetch.

It was a momentous day when I was able to squeeze enough from my paycheck to purchase a stereo system, and the man who delivered and installed it was the deliveryman who had the greatest long-term impact on Homer’s life. Homer hadn’t been exposed much to music. Once my CDs came out of their boxes and found their way into the new CD player, a further audio vista opened before him. I learned that music had a tremendous impact on Homer’s moods. Anything with a hard, driving tempo—rock or clubby dance music, for instance—sent him into a tizzy. Hole’s Live Through This made him hyper almost beyond the telling of it. He’d tear around the living room, leaping manically on and off the couch or flinging himself to the top of his six-foot cat tower, while uttering a low whine as if his body held so much energy, the containment of it was painful.

The first time I played the Brandenburg Concertos, however, Homer fell into a deep sleep right in the middle of chasing a paper ball around. It happened as swiftly as if he’d been shot in the neck with a tranquilizer dart.

My friend Felix was visiting that day. “Guess Homer doesn’t like your taste in music,” he said.

I shrugged. “Everyone’s a critic.”

HOMER WASN’T A creature who was moved simply by the sounds he heard around him. He was equally concerned with the sounds he himself produced. It was important to Homer to feel that he and I were in constant communication with each other, and he was never content—as my other two cats were—to incorporate silent gestures or postures into our vernacular. Scarlett, for example, would sit pointedly in front of the litter box when she thought it was time for me to clean it, and Vashti had a bizarre, ritualistic dance that she did in circles around her food bowl whenever she was hungry.

But Homer—who, of course, had no understanding that he was visible generally or visible to me specifically—eschewed such imprecise methods of getting his point across. At three years of age, he had developed a full, incessant range of meows and yelps that bordered on the human in its nuance and complexity.

Homer was still convinced that as long as he made no sound, I couldn’t “see” him, and he never tired of trying to get away with things right under my nose that he knew he shouldn’t. As a kitten, he had accepted my command of “No!” with nothing beyond a look of confusion. How can she always know what I’m doing?! These days, he argued with me—with a long, high-pitched meeeeeeh I thought of as his way of saying, Awwwww … c’mon, Ma …

He had a very specific meow that meant, Where’s my worm? I can’t find my worm! and another, slightly more prolonged meow that meant, Okay, I found my worm, now I need you to throw it. Then there was a low, guttural, drawn-out kind of cry that I heard if I was thoroughly engrossed in something—watching a movie, say—and hadn’t paid attention to him in a couple of hours. It was a meow that very clearly said, I’m boooooooored, and it would only be discontinued if I hauled out something for him to play with.

There were happy, half-swallowed little yips that greeted me whenever I came through the front door. Yay, you’re home! A tiny, plaintive mew? that went up at the end, like a sentence punctuated by a question mark, meant Homer had fallen asleep in a room I was no longer in and, now that he was awake, wanted to know where I was.

A piercing, persistent kind of mew that I rarely heard strummed a fearful twang in my stomach, because it meant Homer had gotten himself stuck in or on top of something and didn’t know how to get back down. “Where are you, Homer-Bear?” I’d say, following the sound of his cries through the apartment until I located him. The one that drove me to distraction was a repetitive, atonal mrow, mrow, mrow, mrow, which Homer produced if I’d been talking on the phone for a while. It was like a small child’s relentless chanting of Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, until, exasperated, I’d put one hand over the receiver and say, “Homer, can’t you see I’m on the phone right now?”

Hey—most people forgot Homer was blind once they’d spent enough time with him. I occasionally forgot, too.

ONE OF THE luxuries I now indulged in was a subscription to the newspaper—the first I’d ever had in my own name. The leisurely perusal of the paper over a light breakfast was a treasured and essential component of my morning routine.

Delivery of the newspaper soon became a highlight in Homer’s schedule as well. This was not because he’d developed a sudden, passionate interest in current affairs. It was because the good people at the newspaper production plant saw fit to churn out and deliver the paper to my door every morning-wrapped in a rubber band.

Homer had never been interested in rubber bands, even though most cats love them. Generally, what they like to do is eat them—a dangerous, and sometimes fatal, habit. If I happened to lose track of one and it made its way into Scarlett’s or Vashti’s paws, she’d bat it around and munch on it happily until I saw it and took it away. Homer would sit nearby, straining his ears for some clue as to what, exactly, made this game so interesting. I don’t get it, you guys. What’s the big deal?

But that was before Homer learned that a rubber band, stretched taut around a rolled-up newspaper and plucked by a single claw, would produce a sound.

As with so many great discoveries, this one was an accident. I had left the paper, with its rubber band, on the coffee table one morning while I retrieved my toast and juice. Homer leapt onto the table to investigate. From the kitchen, I heard a ping! There was a pause, then another ping! The next pause was shorter than the first, and it was followed by a Ping! Pi-ping ping! Ping! I came out from the kitchen to find Homer cocking his head curiously from side to side, as enthralled by the reverb of the still-vibrating rubber band as he’d been by its initial sound. He plucked the rubber band again and pressed his paw over it while it vibrated. Upon realizing that doing this made both sound and vibration stop, he plucked at it once more.

“I’m sorry, kitty,” I said, and I really did feel bad. He was having such a good time! But I wasn’t about to forgo my morning paper fix—and I certainly wasn’t leaving Homer in possession of a rubber band. I unrolled the newspaper and threw the rubber band into the trash. And there, I thought, was the end of it.

Like most cats, Homer was a creature of habit. Being blind, he was even more wedded to his habits than the average cat. Homer, for example, would only curl up next to me on my left side. He may not have even known I had a right side, so ingrained was his habit of sitting to my left. If I adopted a position on the couch that made only my right side available, Homer would wander around, meowing in nervous confusion, until I shifted over.

When I added a set of squat wooden candlesticks to the coffee table, it took Homer weeks to learn not to bump into them. This wasn’t because he was slow in figuring out how to avoid solid objects; he’d learned his way around the entire apartment in under an hour. It was because once he’d learned the exact number of steps left and right that took him from one end of the coffee table to the other—like learning where immovable things such as walls and doorways were—it was difficult for him to get past the ingrained habit of his memorized routine. When I tried to replace Homer’s stuffed worm—which was, by now, hardly more than a few tufts of fabric clinging to a tiny, dented bell—with an identical new one, he sniffed it once, gave it a single toss into the air, and stalked away in disgust. He slept in the same spot on my bed every night, for exactly as long as I slept. Scarlett and Vashti would also pile into bed with me, but they would leave in the late-night hours to scamper around the apartment together. Homer had trained himself to sleep as long as I slept, and to remain there until I awoke.

Waiting for the predawn thonk! of the newspaper against our front door immediately became a new Homer habit. The joys he’d discovered in making his own music were so great that they overrode his three-year-long old habit of sleeping as long as I did. No matter how I tried to wean him from the newspaper and its rubber band, no matter how I tried to distract, cajole, or plead with him, he would sit with his nose flush against the crack of the front door at exactly five thirty every morning. Once he heard the paper land, he’d paw at the door and meow frantically (The paper’s here! Mom, hurry, the paper’s here!) until I stumbled out of bed long enough to bring it in and drop it at his feet. My reward for this act of mercy was a solid hour of Ping! Ping! Ping! Pi-ping pi-ping ping!

It was maddening.

Finally, to preserve both my sleep and my sanity—because the constant strumming of that single note, over and over again, was killing the latter as surely as it was the former—I did something I remembered my grandmother doing for me when I was a child. I took an empty Kleenex box and wrapped five rubber bands of varying thickness around it. I then handed this impromptu guitar over to Homer.

He was utterly enraptured. Each rubber band played a completely distinct note. The hollowness of the empty Kleenex box added depth and resonance to these notes. The best part was that, since this toy was available all the time, I was able to put it away while I slept and Homer resumed sleeping the whole night through with me, knowing it would be there waiting for him when he woke up. If I was reading or talking on the phone, Homer entertained himself with it for endless, rhapsodic hours. Our home became a veritable philharmonic, where ad hoc concertos of Ping! Ping plong BOING! could be heard.

The only thing that interfered with this affair of the heart was the occasional breaking of a rubber band. It would snap up into Homer’s face so suddenly, and with so little warning, that Homer leapt back a good foot and a half, grimacing horribly, his fur standing straight up on end. What the …?!!? He would approach the box again cautiously, cocking his head from left to right, and smack it quickly and firmly with his paw. Hit me and I’ll hit you back. Then he’d leap away once more, as if afraid what the consequences of his own daring might be.

Homer would sulk for hours after an incident like this, refusing to so much as go near the thing after he’d smacked it back into submission. I couldn’t help but laugh. “Art is suffering,” I’d tell him. But he loved his tissue-box guitar too much to stay angry with it for very long. The next morning would find him plucking away as if nothing had gone awry.

I wish I could conclude this chapter by saying that Homer eventually learned to play something recognizable, like “Oh! Susanna” or anything from side one of Led Zeppelin IV.

But if he had, you almost certainly would have heard of him before this.