by Gwen Cooper
The phone didn’t stop ringing all day. My parents called every few hours to see if there was any word from the vet, as did Laurence. Laurence must have spread the word that Homer wasn’t well, because his parents and sister also called, as did many of our friends—even our friends who weren’t “pet people,” who’d never had pets of their own, and who I wouldn’t have expected to empathize with a pet’s illness. But it had always been that way with Homer; to have met him even once was to interest yourself in his welfare. As the number of callers swelled, it was clear how important it was to many—and not just to me—that this scrappy little Daredevil, this small cat who’d made a heroic and extraordinary act out of living an ordinary life, pull yet another life from the nine he’d been burning through since he was a blind, half-starved two-week-old a hairbreadth away from an inglorious end in a shelter.
Call me, they all insisted. Call me as soon as you hear from the vet.
The vet never was able to determine what, precisely, had made Homer so ill. When the tests came back, the only thing he could say was that there had, indeed, been some minor damage to Homer’s liver—which could have been the cause of his illness, but could also have been one of its effects. The vet asked me to keep him apprised and to bring Homer back for a follow-up visit in a week, which I did. Homer received a clean bill of health.
And, in a sense, Homer recovered fully. By the next day he was up and around a bit, eating sparingly and halfheartedly batting around a crumpled-up ball of paper. Within three days, he had resumed his usual eating habits.
Homer still scampers and darts joyfully through our home, but not so often as he used to, and not with the same ease. He moves with a certain stiffness to his joints, and I’ve begun adding a supplement to their food that helps promote joint flexibility in senior cats. He sleeps more often and more deeply than he did of old, and if awakened unexpectedly he can be downright cranky. He still loves to doze near Scarlett and Vashti, but sometimes he hisses at them when they accidentally disturb his rest—Homer, who never hissed, except when there was danger. His coat had been as purely black as a piece of polished onyx, but now it’s flecked with gray, and a single whisker grew in a conspicuous shade of silver. He never regained all the weight he lost, and Laurence and I joke that he has the hipbones of a supermodel, but it isn’t a joke that either of us finds especially funny.
Perhaps the most visible change of all is that Homer no longer plays with his stuffed worm. It sits discarded and bedraggled—it’s as old as Scarlett, after all—in a corner of our apartment. From time to time I pull it out and try to reintroduce Homer to his former best friend, but it’s as if he decided one day that the stuffed worm belonged to a different era. The era of his youth.
Yet not even the onset of old age can completely defeat Homer’s irrepressible high spirits. He still scraps tooth and claw for a stolen morsel of turkey when Laurence makes a sandwich. He still hasn’t given up on his life’s dream of successfully trouncing Scarlett—always “sneaking” up on her from the front, in plain sight. The two of them play this game with less speed, perhaps, but with equal vigor, and the look on Scarlett’s face seems to say, Aren’t we getting too old for this? He spends entire days following the path of the sun across our living room rug, purring happily in the warmth of the light he’s never seen.
Most of all, what remains the same is Homer’s overwhelming joy in the morning when I get out of bed and his day begins. He still spends a good ten minutes rubbing his face vigorously against mine, still purrs with as much singsong richness as he did that first morning, as a kitten, when he’d realized that both of us were still here.
With age, perhaps, Homer has realized—as Laurence himself is fond of saying—that any day spent above ground with your loved ones is a good day.
24 • Reader, I Married Him
May you whom I leave behind me give happiness to your families; may heaven vouchsafe you every good grace, and may no evil thing come upon your people.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
LAURENCE AND I WERE MARRIED IN SEPTEMBER, IN THE PENTHOUSE OF a funky downtown office building. It commanded sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline at night, befitting a groom as much in love with New York as Laurence was, and reflecting all the best in my own life since moving to New York with my cats nearly eight years earlier.
We decided to dispense with many of the formalities associated with weddings. Our guest list was kept scrupulously small (although there was a rather large Swedish contingency). I wore a vintage, 1940s-era cocktail dress, wide in the shoulders and narrow at the waist, rather than a formal wedding gown. There was plenty of dancing but no seating arrangements, no five-course dinner, no flower-draped aisle or even, for that matter, any aisle at all. We opted for a cocktail party—with passed hors d’oeuvres and lots of liquor—that happened to have a wedding ceremony in the middle. When the evening was about halfway through, we gathered our friends and families together, popped up a chuppah (the canopy under which Jewish wedding ceremonies are held), called the rabbi forward, and were married. The ring I gave to Laurence was inscribed with a passage from the Song of Songs: Ani l’dodi v’dodi li, which means, I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. When we kissed for the first time as husband and wife at the ceremony’s conclusion, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” played. Andrea and Steve, who had introduced us to each other, introduced us to the crowd as Mr. and Mrs. Lerman. Then the music and dancing resumed once more.
Laurence and I liked to speculate before the wedding as to the roles we would have assigned to the cats, if it had been even remotely feasible to have the three of them in attendance. We could press Vashti, with all the glory of her natural bridal white, into service as a ring bearer. And surely we could find important jobs for Homer and Scarlett. It was pure silliness, naturally, but still … it felt odd to get married without the cats there. One way or another, they had influenced and participated in just about every momentous occasion in my life over the past fourteen years. If not for Homer, I might never have come to appreciate the value of a man like Laurence. I would have loved Laurence’s warmth, humor, and quick mind no matter what, but I might never have understood that when you find someone whose essential character is so strong as to leave no room for doubt, you’ve found a rock that you can build your life on.
It’s become trendy, in recent years, to talk about how much longer it takes people of my generation to grow up and think of ourselves as adults. But growing up doesn’t necessarily mean getting married, having children, or taking out a mortgage. Growing up means learning to be responsible for others—and embracing the great joys those responsibilities can bring. Homer taught me that building my life around someone other than myself, making myself responsible for someone else’s life, is one of the most rewarding differences between being a kid and being an adult.
Being the parent of a special-needs pet means living your life constantly poised on the edge of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you become a fierce defender of the ways in which your little one is perfectly ordinary—all the things he or she can do that are just like what everybody else does. No need for any extra attention here, thank you very much. And yet, you never lose sight of how absolutely extraordinary that very ordinariness is, how difficult, remarkable, and rewarding that fight to be “just like everybody else” has been.
Maybe Homer isn’t really any more extraordinary than other cats. But among the small circle of people whose lives he’s touched, this tiny cat who nobody wanted—who nobody, with the exception of one young and idealistic veterinarian, believed could ever go on to live a good life—has been a source of minor miracles, major joy, and a concrete example of that best of all possible truths:
Nobody can tell you what your potential is.
Back before I adopted Homer I had believed, with the certainty of a child, that the way my life was then was the way it would always be—that the career, the relationships, and the life that I wanted would always be somewhere beyon
d my reach. Yet here I was—a published author, a bride about to be married to the single greatest man I had ever met. The one thing I knew for sure about our future was that it could be anything we wanted it to be.
Despite having forgone so many of the traditional wedding trappings, Laurence and I opted for a strictly traditional ceremony. The ceremony is the thing, after all, and we liked the idea of saying the same words, and having the same words said over us, that had been said by and for our grandparents and great-grandparents, and other brides and grooms for thousands of generations before us.
This meant that we didn’t write our own vows. Instead, we toasted each other once the ceremony was over. I spoke of Laurence’s astonishing wit and intelligence, his strength that I never believed possible I would find in anybody. “I laugh every single day,” I said. “And it is miraculous to me every single day that the greatest man I’ve ever known loves me, too.”
“Let me tell you a little something about Mrs. Lerman,” Laurence said, when it was his turn to toast me. He went on to speak about brains and beauty, about passion and compassion. “Gwen is the most passionate person I’ve ever met, and also the most logical,” he said. “She’s passionate about being logical. I had no idea this was even possible.”
On the theme of combining passion and logic, I knew from years of event production that no matter how free flowing and spontaneous a party felt, it needed to have a strong logistical skeleton. So I carefully scripted everything out—lighting changes, the time for the ceremony, the schedule for toasts—in an Excel spreadsheet and sent it to all vendors and participants (including Andrea and Steve) several weeks ahead of time. I was mocked relentlessly for this, but I was firm in my belief that without a clear organizational flow, chaos would ensue.
Even though I had orchestrated everything down to the last detail, however, there was one surprise in store for me that night. After he concluded his toast, Laurence called forward Alex and Zachary, his eight- and five-year-old nephews, and Allison, the seven-year-old daughter of his first cousin. He retrieved three large, foam-core posters from some hidden corner I hadn’t noticed, and handed one to each of them. “I need some help for this part,” he told them. “Can you guys help me?”
They had obviously been prepped for this beforehand. Their faces nearly split beneath their wide grins of anticipation as they each eagerly took hold of one of the posters.
“There are three ‘people’ who couldn’t be here tonight,” Laurence said. “Technically, they weren’t invited. People who know me can’t believe I live with three cats. But I do, and it wouldn’t be a celebration of ours if they weren’t included. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you for the first time, in a very real and legally binding sense … Vashti Cooper-Lerman!”
Allison held up her poster, and it contained an enormous photo of Vashti in midstride, looking adoringly out into the crowd as, no doubt, she had looked adoringly at the man holding the camera.
“Three things you need to know about Vashti,” Laurence said. “Number one, Vashti is beautiful. Number two, Vashti knows she’s beautiful. Number three, Vashti knows that you know she’s beautiful.”
People laughed, although not nearly as hard as I did.
“Next,” Laurence continued, “for the first time ever—legally and officially … Scarlett Cooper-Lerman!”
Alex held up the poster of Scarlett. In her photo, Scarlett was lying on her side, her head raised as she gazed rather majestically into the middle distance.
“I’ve lived with this cat for three years,” Laurence said, “and last week she let me touch her for the first time.”
Poor Scarlett! Always fated to be misunderstood.
“And, last but not least, the star of the family, our Daredevil and truly the coolest cat in town … Homer Cooper-Lerman!”
Zachary held up a poster-sized photo of Homer sniffing inquisitively at the camera lens. “And he’s blind!” Zachary announced with great pride. “He’s blind but he can walk around and everything!”
The crowd chuckled appreciatively as they clapped and cheered. It was Homer’s first official standing ovation.
“This is a cat who knows how to live,” Laurence said. “He’s got this huge world in that little head, and you can tell just by looking at him that every second of every day of his life is an adventure. I only wish,” he concluded, “that I could see what that cat hears.”
It was the first time I had heard Homer described by somebody else, the first time that I wasn’t the one who explained him or answered questions about him. But if anybody had asked me that night, What do you mean he has no eyes? How does he get around? How can a cat live with no eyes? my answer would have been different, and infinitely simpler, than the stock answers I usually gave.
I am Homer’s eyes. And he is my heart. And finally, the two of us—Homer and I—had found another person whose own heart was big enough to carry us all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is with gratitude and joy that I thank the following for their contributions:
Michele Rubin of Writers House, indisputably the world’s greatest literary agent. Michele is a staunch and savvy advocate, a warm and compassionate friend, and the strongest shoulder an emotional wreck of a writer like me was ever fortunate enough to lean on. There may be other agents out there as tough, smart, loyal, sympathetic, conscientious, and flat-out funny as Michele is, but I don’t know any of them.
There are perfectionists, and then there’s Caitlin Alexander, editor par excellence. I don’t think there was a single word of this book that didn’t fall under Caitlin’s appraising eye, and she forced me—every step of the way—to dig deeper and write better. Caitlin infused the writing and editing process with enough warmth, humor, and wisdom to make the creation of this book an even greater joy than I originally anticipated. I am also grateful to the enthusiastic and indefatigable Lea Beresford, assistant editor, and to Laura Jorstad, an outstanding copy editor.
Blind Cat Rescue and Sanctuary, Inc. There are thousands of cats like Homer, and most of them are considered unadoptable. Too many end up being euthanized. One of only two shelters in the U.S. dedicated specifically to caring for blind cats and kittens, Blind Cat Rescue offers as many as they can a permanent, loving home. They also provide a trove of resources for people considering adopting a blind cat, or whose cats have become blind due to illness or old age. I would also like to thank Alana Miller, director of Blind Cat Rescue—the very first person I reached out to when I was writing the initial proposal for this book, and a staunch supporter of it ever since. (www.blindcatrescue.com)
My sister, Dawn, and my parents, Barbara and David, who gave all four of us a home when we needed one, who gave me personally a love for animals that remains one of the great joys of my life, and who still offer, at least once a year, to take care of Homer in case, “God forbid, anything happens” to me.
Claire Moskowitz Berkowitz (1914–87), loving grandmother, inexhaustible trove of wit and wisdom, and the finest human being I have even known. There isn’t a single day that you aren’t in my heart.
Saundra and Bennett Lerman, the greatest imaginable parents-in-law, and this book’s biggest cheering section.
Andrea and Steve Kline. Honestly, where do I begin to thank you for two decades of friendship, laughter, support, advice, and, of course, the introduction to the man I married?
Dr. Patricia Khuly, Homer’s first “mom,” for bringing into my life what I didn’t even know was missing until it was there.
Keli Goff, the brilliant writer and pundit who made the shiddach to end all shiddachs when she introduced me to Michele. Keli has also offered more advice, moral support, and sympathetic late-night counsel that I can begin to express.
Dr. Henry and Stephanie Hirsch, my honorary second set of parents. I can’t imagine life as a Cooper without the Hirsches.
Dr. Spencer “Spike” and Sandy Foreman, for years of holiday dinners, laughter, and warmth.
The following fr
iends and well-wishers: David Juskow, David Leopold, Richard Jay-Alexander, George Ratafia, Hillary Cole, Alexander Cole, Zachary Cole, Anise Labrum, Kate Rockland, Kris Carpenter, Digby Leibowitz, Michael Tronn, Brian Antoni, Laura Gould, Merle and Danny Weiss, and Samantha Abramovitz.
In loving memory: Tippi Cooper, Penny Cooper, Misty Cooper, Casey Cooper, Brandi Cooper, and Bud-the-Cat Labrum.
My fellow writers and commenters on Open Salon (www.open.salon.com), without whose early and vocal enthusiasm for Homer’s story, there might not have been a book in the first place: Rich Banks, Delia Black, Cynthia Blair, Pat Blankenship, Missy Blum, Amanda Campbell, Harry Chapman, Julie Connelly, Karen Dexter, Lauren Dillon, Lynn Dirk, Dana Douglas, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Todd Elner, Liz Emrich, Marple Fank, Susanne Freeborn, Kate Griffin, Allie Griffith, Bryan Harrison, Madeline and George Hayes, Ellen Hebert, Jennifer Hulme, David Jimenez, Roy Jimenez, Dorothy Johnson, Gary Justis, Mary Kelly-Williams, Melissa Kennedy, Lisa Kern, Marcelle Kube, Denise LeBlanc-Bock, Magpie May, Connie McCarthy, Beth McGee, Mari McNeil, Megan McSparren-Griffith, Christine Mermilliod, Susan Mitchell, Brinna Nanda, Sherie New, odetteroulette, Josephine E. Ortez, Mary Pacheco, Ann Patrykus, Professor Terri, Michael Rodgers, Aaron Rury, Jenni Ryan, Donna Sandstrom, Bill Schwartz, Cherie Siebert, Patricia Smith, Jane Smithie, Janet Spencer, Patricia Steiner, Shelle Stormoe, Suzn-Maree, Umbrellakineses, Denese Ashbaugh Vlosky, and Joyce Wermont.
And, finally, those paragons of feline virtue: Scarlett Cooper-Lerman, Vashti Cooper-Lerman, and Homer Cooper-Lerman. There are no words for the love.