Гвен Купер: Homer: The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

It wasn’t just in the U.S. and Canada where Homer was gaining a following. Foreign rights to Homer’s Odyssey had sold in nearly twenty countries before the book was even published, and some of those translations began to appear right around the time the U.S. edition did. I always got a kick out of the foreign editions, the different artwork of their covers, all the various iterations of Homer that differed so greatly from country to country that it was hard to believe they were all publishing the same book. Some countries—like Brazil, France, Russia, and China—used the literal translation of “Homer’s Odyssey” as the title for their editions. Others took more of a creative license. In Italy it was Omero Gatto Nero , in Germany Homer und Ich . In Finland, the book was called Homer – Kissan Uskomaton Elama, which meant, Homer – A Cat’s Incredible Life . The Dutch went with a straightforward Wonderkat! , and in Hungary it was simply Homér —the book’s cover a stark block of solid red, with Homer’s name in huge white letters, and in the middle of the cover a very small silhouetted profile of a black cat with a curled tail.

The Japanese title translated roughly into I See Happy Love. I’m still unsure as to what the Korean title meant, although I adoredthe artwork they included. At the end of the book were several pages of prints depicting vividly hued watercolor paintings, like something from a book of fairy tales. One of them showed a girl who I think was supposed to be me—although she looked like Alice in Wonderland —being borne aloft into a starry night by a tuxedoed, flower-bearing, eyeless black cat, trailing a little gray tabby and an even smaller white kitty in the air behind her. A smiling man (Laurence?) waved them all off from a bedroom window.

Homer soon began to receive cards and letters and gifts from the other countries where his story had been published. Somewhere along the line, I realized, he had become not merely my cat, but the world’s cat.

And yet, he was still just our happy little boy. He had been with me for so long—and while I couldn’t say that I took him for granted, he had become as essential, yet also as everyday, as the beating of my own heart.

I would look at Homer sometimes—as he chased a bedeviled Scarlett down the hall, or jumped onto my desk and did his best to keep me from typing, or rolled onto his back to groom the chocolate-and-black fur of his belly—and I would marvel. It was an impossible, an incomprehensible, thing to try to fathom, that so many people all across the globe knew him. Knew him and loved him.

NATURALLY, HOMER HAD his own Facebook page. It was just a regular personal page at first, but when he reached his 5000-friend limit, I started a “fan” page for him—although I never thought of it that way. Only about a thousand of Homer’s Facebook friends followed us to this new page—and even though it grew incrementally, adding perhaps two hundred new followers each month, it still felt like a small, intimate community.

It was Homer’s page, and so I wrote there in Homer’s voice—not his actual voice, obviously, but the way Homer had always sounded in my own head. I’ll admit that I’d never been much for personal photographs, but now we were snapping photos of Homer, Scarlett, and Vashti constantly. I tried to mine our everyday lives for the kinds of things I thought people who’d read the book, and now wanted to keep up with Homer on a day-to-day basis, might find entertaining. Oh boy! Turkey for dinner! , I’d write, above a snapshot of Homer doing his best to steal a bit of food from Laurence’s plate. Or, * My* little bag of catnip! MINE! along with a photo of Homer crouched protectively over one of the small bags of home-grown ‘nip a friend had sent from her Tennessee farm.

I had a hard time explaining to my mother, when she asked what my workdays now consisted of, that I spent a significant portion of my time pretending to be my cat online.

“But people do know that it’s really you posting these things, right?” she asked.

“No, mom,” I deadpanned. “People think that Homer is climbing onto the keyboard of my computer and typing these things himself.”

It was a difficult thing to explain to a parent—although it felt perfectly natural and right to me. People would laugh at “Homer’s” daily dispatches, and I was just as apt to laugh and sympathize with the comments and photos they posted themselves. Our regular readers would comment amusingly on my posts detailing Homer’s doings, and they would also post pictures and updates about their own cats. I knew more cats on a first-name basis during this time than I ever had before. It might not be strictly accurate to say that I “knew” them—seeing as I’d never actually met them. But, then again, I knew them in the same way our readers knew Homer, through the stories their humans told, the concerns they shared, and the insights they offered when one or another of us would ask questions about preferred litter brands or appropriate diets for aging cats.

This all sounds about as “cat lady” as it gets—so I’ll also add that, on occasion, our little community was able to do some real good. Every once in a while a shelter would write to me about an impossible-to-place blind cat and, inevitably, among Homer’s community, we would find the perfect home for him. An acquaintance of mine living in Queens discovered two neglected cats in the basement of her apartment building. The building super had put them down there a year earlier, when they were only kittens, for the purpose of keeping the building rat-free. He’d barely thought about them since, and now my friend wanted to find a real home for them—one from which they could see the sunlight they’d never once experienced in their lives.

Homer will never be able to see sunshine, but these two cats can… my post about them began. Within only a few days, we had half a dozen firm offers of forever homes in the New York area alone. Geoffrey Jennings from Rainy Day Books in Kansas City—a passionate cat lover—offered a trove of autographed, first-edition, collectible books to go along with the cats to their new home. Five days later, all of us in Homer’s community were rewarded with a picture of the two cats basking in the sunlight streaming through the bay window of a Brooklyn brownstone. The woman who adopted the cats named them Ellis, after Ellis Island, and Morgan, after the Morgan Library in Manhattan’s East Thirties, because the cats had come to her with a library of their own.

We also chipped in small donations, in Homer’s community, and were able to raise maybe a thousand dollars or so when natural disasters struck in various parts of the world—the kinds of tragedies that so often affected animals as well as humans, yet during which animals tended to be forgotten. My philosophy was that when you helped animals, you helped people, too—always remembering that the ASPCA, when they’d organized a rescue effort for pets in the wake of 9/11, had also helped people like me in the process. We collected food and other essentials and sent them to where they would do the most good.

Mostly, though, we simply enjoyed each other’s company.

Not that everything was all positivity and sunshine. I soon learned that whereas novels are works of fiction, memoirs are true—and while (having written one of each) I’d always been aware of this technical distinction, what I hadn’t thought about is that when readers don’t like the “character” in your memoir, the person they actually dislike is you, yourself.