by Shoshanna Mccollum

Created on: February 02, 2009

Homer's Odyssey, A Blind Cat's Epic Tail

Homer came to us in the eye of a storm. Much like his namesake, a blind man whose poems of great adventure and the tragedies of war survived through time, Homer was a cat that managed to beat the odds.

It was the fall of 1999, Hurricane Floyd was making a b-line to Fire Island, or so they said. I remember biding my time as I watched The Weather Channel tracking a storm that never came. But the telephone call did. Not unlike many calls we may get in any given year: Kittens found in the woodshed. The advice I gave was rote:

"Take them out of the shed," I told her, "the mother will come back and get them."

The mother did take them, save one. When the woman told me the last kitten had "white stuff in its eyes." I knew the mother wasn't going to come back for him. I warned her that the kitten was sick and possibly would not make it through the night. However, the kitten did survive but several weeks later the eyes did not improve.

Instead, he was unceremoniously left in our care. The woman had taken the kitten to a homeopathic veterinarian who instructed her not to use antibiotics. Advice which in any other situation may have been the right advice to give, but when we got the little guy to our own vet, we were told the untreated eye-infection had burned out his vision forever.

I remember standing in the street scolding the woman. Telling her to never take an animal to a crystal-toting quack again. I was angry. Not so much at the woman, but the fact that I knew that I was stuck with the animal and not one bit happy about that.

My husband John swore to me that keeping the kitten was only a temporary thing. At the time we were only three months married, but I saw no less then seven "temporary things" sitting on the kitchen table looking at me. How was this skinny, charcoal-gray creature with Little Orphan Annie eyes ever going to make it here? I knew that Max, the alpha-male at the time could be a bully. I feared he would never get a fair chance at the food dish.

"He will never jump in high places or give you the grief the other cats gave you." I told my mother on the telephone as I tried to convince her to take him. She did not seem impressed. While I hopelessly tried to sell her the idea, he jumped on my knee. He rolled on his back and fell asleep with an "I have a home" smile on his face.

That same day we placed on him the ground, and he postured to the other cats with an arched back and a little "don't mess with me" dance. He then

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