The Big Honk by Ruth Ross Saucier

It was May and we were on our way to the University District Street Fair.  Booths full of food, arts and crafts, and music.  Great fun.

We were walking through the tree line that separated the University of Washington from the “U” district, when out from the shrubbery came bounding two tiny white kittens. Snow white.  Friendly as can be and cute: one had two blue eyes and the other had one gold and one blue eye.  We trotted up and down the fair together and even though I had said aloud that we’d look for someone to take them home, in my heart I knew that someone was us.

Natasha

The two tiny stinkers made themselves to home in no time.  Clearly litter mates and abandoned, we tentatively named the odd-eyed white Natasha. Her brother, Giuseppe, was all blue eyes with a pushy, alpha temperament. Our apartment had tall ceilings and the former occupant was an art student who had papered the bedroom walls in burlap. For us, the result was “meh”—but for Tasha, it was a vertical Daytona 500. She’d race across those walls in tall bell curves, strafing the entire room, usually with her brother right after her.    These two kittens made for a mad house, and these two were clearly in charge.

But the name Giuseppe didn’t stick.  When the nieces and nephews came to visit, they marveled at the size of our blue-eyed boy, remarking on how he was a “big honker.” Soon the name “Honk” emerged, and it stuck. Honk grew to be fifteen pounds and soon it was clear he was different from his sister.  It always took an effort to get him to wake up from naps, but we didn’t figure it out until we compared their reactions to the vacuum cleaner.  Tasha wanted nothing to do with it, freaking out, running, and hiding.  Honk loved the vacuum cleaner, even volunteered to be vacuumed.  We eventually learned Honk was deaf as the proverbial post.*

Honk

We also needed to learn how to get Honk’s attention. Yelling didn’t work.  You could walk right up to him and scream, and he’d sleep right through it. The only thing that worked was vibration. If you stomped on the floor, even from a couple of rooms away, his head would pop up and he’d look for the source immediately.

It soon became standard practice to stomp on the floor to get his attention for all reasons: dinner, a demand for him to stop pestering Tasha, a reaction to his latest unearthing of a houseplant, you name it: floor stomping became an automatic response. We also would yell “HONK!” at the same time—even knowing he couldn’t hear us; it was just an ingrained reaction.

We never got any complaints, but to this day, I often wonder if our downstairs neighbors thought we’d joined an obscure cult that mandated random stomping and bellowing “HONK”. 

  

*White blue-eyed animals of various species are often completely deaf, a genetic condition linked to eye color. We were also told that our white cat with one gold and one blue eye was probably deaf in one ear—the one correlating with the blue eye.