Otus the Head Cat

Classic column revisits origin of Otus' name.

Note: Otus the Head Cat is on a super secret, triple dog dare, heavily redacted special assignment this week. In an online poll of 18,500 faithful Otus readers, this enlightening column from April 9, 2005, was requested by 87 percent.

It is a minor irritation with which your Head Cat has had to deal since the beginning. It has to do with my name. After 25 years of being in the paper, some folks still can’t spell it correctly.

Our name is what we carry through life and, if we’re fortunate, they’ll name a street after us when we’re gone.

There’s even a parking lot divider at the Clinton library named for city director Dean Kumpuris, and an access ramp there named for former city manager Mahlon Martin.

Their names will live forever. Or at least until some future city board thinks of some reason to “un-honor” them as one did with poor long-dead Judge Joseph Asher and his avenue.

A couple of years ago Asher had two miles of his avenue (the western two miles) transferred to Colonel Glenn.

If I had my own street perhaps people would learn to spell Otus correctly and not like the elevator folks.

Otus is a noble name from Greek mythology. It was bestowed upon me in 1976 after my epiphany upon the road to Goshen outside Fayetteville.

According to official Otus myth and legend, the blinding light came and the booming voice told me that, verily, henceforth my birth name (Ralph) was out, and my Head Cat name, Otus, was in.

Is it a difficult name? Just ask Millie Jo Collins, a longtime reader who lives in Ash Flat, an idyllic community of 700 souls just outside the Arkansas Yankee Containment Area No. 4 at Cherokee Village.

Miss Millie, a former English teacher, is a woman of quick wit and impeccable taste. Nonetheless, she sent me an email addressed to “Odus.”

When gently chided, she responded, “I am mortified. One would never believe that I read ‘Otus’ each week! Up here in the hills we have lots of variations on that name: Otus, Odis, Odus and Otis.”

I feel great personal shame at having brought this dear, sweet woman to mortification. The thought of making a loyal reader embarrassed or disconcerted is anathema to me and runs contrary to the teachings of Kalaka, representative of He Whose Name is Never Spoken.

Aside: For years I believed it was “an athema,” not anathema. Athema isn’t even a neologism.

How many columns would Miss Millie have read had she, indeed, read them each week?

On April 19, we will celebrate a quarter century of weekly Otus the Head Cat columns for this newspaper and its predecessor, the Arkansas Democrat.

And since two stand-alone columns actually appeared in 1979, Otus columns have been with us in parts of four decades — the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and now the 2000s.

That is a humbling accomplishment.

Miss Millie, who turns 51 in July, has been reading my column since she was a young woman of 25. Doing the math, she will have read about 1,300 columns — each and every one credited to Otus the Head Cat. Otus. With a “t.”

But who was Otus? In Greek mythology, Otus and his twin, Ephialtes (known as the Aloadae), were two giants, sons of Poseidon. The twins could not be killed by the gods nor man.

In their haughty, vainglorious hubris, they tried to reach heaven to overthrow the gods by piling Mount Ossa on top of Mount Olympus and then Mount Pelion on top of Mount Ossa.

They were well on their way when Artemis tricked them into killing each other with spears. After that they were condemned to eternal torture in Tartarus, which was a nasty place below Hades.

I, however, was predestined to a kinder fate after my untimely demise (I fell into a goldfish pond) in 1992 at the venerable and barely ambulatory age of 17.

According to Head Cat tradition, my earthly coil was lovingly placed in a 113 liter, 1.1 millimeter-thick, Hefty Cinch Sak and buried beneath a mulberry tree near the pond. It was one of my favorite spots where I used to stalk chipmunks in my younger days.

A cairn of native Arkansas sandstone was piled upon the freshly turned earth, and three garden gnomes — Emrln, Ganl and Weliin — were set out to watch over the shrine.

Until next time, Kalaka suggests this mnemonic (from the Greek mnemonikos, meaning “mindful”): Otus suits me to a T.

This rare 1984 photo shows Otus the Head Cat dictating his column to Owner. It was a weekly habit until Otus’ death in 1992. These days, he just emails it directly.