And everybody was wrong.
What I remember most from those first few months after breaking up with Jorge was the overwhelming sense that I’d failed the first important test of my adult life. Everyone, including me, had assumed that Jorge and I would get married. What was the point of spending three years with someone if it didn’t lead to marriage? But one sunny Sunday morning Jorge had informed me, in an entirely respectful and matter-of-fact way, that he wasn’t in love with me anymore.
If I was honest with myself, I’d have to admit that I wasn’t in love with him anymore, either. I had been twenty-one when we’d met, and at twenty-four I hardly recognized the girl who’d fallen in love with him. She was a scrapbook filled with old photos of someone who looked much like me, with my nose and my eyes, but whose clothes and hairstyle looked more like the girls’ I’d gone to college with than the way I looked now. I’d been vaguely aware—on some not-quite-conscious level—that I was gradually changing, that the things I’d been sure I wanted only three years earlier might not reflect this newer me, whoever she was. But hearing the words I’m not in love with you anymore had struck me like a body blow. What if, I couldn’t help wondering, the person I was becoming wasn’t lovable?
I was also beginning to have doubts about my career path. Back when Jorge and I had been together, the typically low nonprofit salary I earned had been almost a luxury I’d indulged in, justified by the fact that I was combining it with Jorge’s much larger salary. It was increasingly clear that it wasn’t a salary that could carry me safely into this new phase of my life. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what else exactly I was qualified to do.
It would be an overstatement to say that I had lost all faith in myself. But I was considerably less confident and optimistic than I had been only a year earlier.
I’d found it impossible to say no when Patty called and I heard Homer’s story for the first time. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have been able to say no eventually—in fact, I’d deliberately left myself the option of turning him down, believing that I probably would. Heartbreaking as Homer’s story was, even I knew that I couldn’t save every animal who deserved saving—I would have told myself that I’d already rescued two cats and was doing the best I could for them. I might have hated making that decision, I might have cried for days the way I used to cry when I came home from volunteering at an animal shelter, but, ultimately, I could have lived with it.
It’s also true that, when I did meet him, Homer crawled into my arms with a seemingly immediate willingness to love and be loved by me. Even when I was holding him in that moment, though, I’d known that it wasn’t really about me specifically—that if somebody other than me had shown up at my vet’s office, and whispered to him softly, and picked him up gently, Homer would have been equally willing to love that person.
Sensing that he could have loved anybody as easily as he could love me was actually the first thing that grabbed my heart. Whatever else he might or might not turn out to be, this kitten was a creature with a tremendous capacity for love. The idea of someone having nothing but love to give, yet being unable to find anybody who wanted that love, struck me as unbearably tragic.
The other thing I realized was that, while he seemed loving, he wasn’t scared or desperate to be loved, the way you would expect a kitten—or even a person—who’d experienced nothing but pain, hunger, and fear to be. Nor was he hostile and defensive, a kitten who’d let a hard life stomp all the love right out of him. He was merely curious and affectionate. It 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.
It was a staggering concept for me at the time. I had been dumped, forced to move out of my home, and was having financial problems—and I’d consequently developed an unfortunate tendency to approach life as if it were a grim struggle, to allow self-pity to consume me whenever I lost some of those struggles.
But here was this cat, whose ordeals made my own worst days seem like a week at Disney World, and his attitude upon meeting me appeared to be, Hi! You seem goodhearted and fun. Don’t you find that people generally are goodhearted and fun?
It probably sounds like I’m about to contradict what I said earlier, that I ended up adopting Homer because I thought there was something special about him. It wasn’t that, though. Not exactly.
What happened was that I caught a glimpse of something I desperately needed to believe in at that point in my life. I wanted to believe there could be something within you that was so essential and so courageous that nothing—no boyfriend, no employer, no trauma—could tarnish or rob you of it. And if you had that kind of unbreakable core, not only would it always be yours, but even in your darkest moments others would see it in you, and help you out before the worse came to the absolute worst.
Or, as my grandmother used to put it, “God helps those who help themselves.” If I recognized all that within this kitten now, and took him home because of it, then I would be proving my own theory right.
So I didn’t adopt Homer because he was cute and little and sweet, or because he was helpless and he needed me. I adopted him because when you think you see something so fundamentally worthwhile in someone else, you don’t look for the reasons—like bad timing or a negative bank balance—that might keep it out of your life. You commit to being strong enough to build your life around it, no matter what.
In doing so, you begin to become the thing you admire.
What I’m trying to say is that, when I decided to bring this eyeless kitten home with me, I made my first truly adult decision about a relationship. And, without realizing it, I established the standard by which I would judge all my relationships in the years to come.
3 • The First Day of the Rest of His Life
A good woman, Eurycleia, daughter of Ops, guided [him] to his room, and she loved him better than any other woman in the house did, for she had nursed him when he was a baby.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
SCARLETT HAS ALWAYS ENJOYED SLEEPING ON SOFT, CLOTH-Y PILES OF things, like pillows or towels or piled-up blankets. Vashti prefers dozing on hard surfaces. As I left for work on the morning of the day when I brought Homer home for the first time, Scarlett was napping on a pile of laundry in the back of my closet, while Vashti rested (comfortably?) on top of a wooden desk, her cheek pressed against the sharp corner of a large dictionary.
They looked so peaceful as they regarded me with their heavy-lidded, half-sleeping eyes that I felt a momentary twinge at the havoc I was about to wreak in their lives. “I’ll see you guys later,” I said quietly on my way out the door. “With a big surprise …”
Vashti responded with a gentle cooing sound, while Scarlett merely blinked at me once and rolled over to sprawl on her back, all four paws in the air.
I left work at exactly five thirty that afternoon and headed straight for Patty’s office. Homer had already been loaded into a small purple cat carrier with HOMER COOPER scrawled on a strip of masking tape across the top. I peeked inside, but Homer was all-black and eyeless, and the only thing I could make out clearly was the white of the plastic cone around his neck. Everybody, including Patty, was almost tearful as they waved the two of us off.