The Procession of the Trojan Horse Into Troy by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo.

Not because I have read and taught Homer’s 3,000-year-old epic story The Odyssey but because I knew Christopher Nolan’s IMAX retelling of it would not, like so many “made for the silver screen” films these days, end up being “all hat and no cattle,” sophomoric, tedious at best and sleep inducing at worst.

Why did I and internationally, sold-out audiences on its July 17th premiere know this would be the case?
In short, I guess, because the blind heart knows what makes it skip a beat when, wide-eyed, it feels itself opening rather than closing to someone or something the way Odysseus, with a penteconter load of Homeric grit and leaps of faith in himself, his crew and his theology, felt he could claw his way home after the fall of Troy.

In fact, I suspect, like me, most of my fellow moviegoers with whom I watched The Odyssey will see Nolan’s shake-you-to-your-core film again because most of us never tire of gazing across or down into the Grand Canyon, smiling back into the face of the Man in the Moon, following a falling star as its light winks out into a night sky, looking up to the Statue of Liberty with hope, getting lost in a good book or poem, singing along to favorite songs, studying the colors and shapes in paintings by O’Keeffe, Rockwell or Picasso, and swapping stories or spit with someone you love.

However, sparked by the latest cinematic release of The Odyssey, what I and other admirers of Homer’s The Odyssey now wonder about is this: What did Odysseus do during the years after he re-established his reign as King of Ithaca?

After Odysseus cranked up the volume on his bodacious bow and Penelope’s suitors axed the idea of marrying her, did he put on 50 pounds, sit in the shade all day at the Dairy Queen and barter copies of his The Iliad and The Ecstasy for Dilly Bars and banana splits? Did he “double dip” once he portaged into retirement? 

After paying off his wife’s maxed out credit cards, by auctioning off most of his Trojan memorabilia and collecting a Cyclops cave full of Euros by agreeing to co-star with Dawn Rosy Finger in the Ken Burns PBS Special A Horse of a Different Color, the scholars on the Texas State School Board tell us that most mornings, while his wife slept late in their Heathrow Terminal 5-size bed, sipped Ikarian coffee, and worked the Times crossword puzzle, Odysseus walked Argos on the Athena Loop Trail in Ithaca’s Hermes State Park.

Because we are not Odysseus or Texas public school alumni we can only guess why that centenarian woman, whose deceased husband launched the “Your First Two Hags Fly Free!” campaign for Euthanasia Airlines, was walking her dog in Hermes State Park’s oil refinery, eco-friendly fracking site and gluten-free rail yard. She waltzed around a lowered railroad crossing arm and tried to merge herself and her Shiatsu with a high balling locomotive.

When the engineer saw the prospective merger he sounded his horn several times like Circe on Aeaea when she rings her sports bar’s Happy Hour bell for her boorish American football fans, who, in and out of season, sail up to hog down her home cooked wings and craft beers.

Not because the demure kiss of the gluten-free locomotive launched the Dallas native woman into the upper stratosphere but because her dog suffered a broken hind leg does the incident remain under investigation.

From the top of the loop trail Argos salivated at the sight of the lemmings that scurried back and forth on both sides of the tracks and Tweeted about the incident.

“Look at all the duckets and aluminum cans our neighbor plebs collected to cover that Shiatsu’s vet bill,” his wagging tail told his best friend. “Homeric!” his second-best buddy Lassie barked on her Facebook page when she sniffed Ithaca’s support for the injured canine.

Off the trail, down by the railroad crossing Odysseus put his pet back on his leash of genuine mock Golden Fleece. The crossing arms were raised as high as the arms of surrendering Trojans. The aluminum can collectors had retreated to the sanctuary of the St. Bernard Cathedral. Up and down the empty tracks brightly burning, cemetery green lights signaled it was safe to cross.

“The gods are still with me,” mused the Greek warrior banned from recommended reading lists in the 28th state. “If that crowd, let alone those chariots of paramedics, had spotted me they would have Hectored me into posing for pictures with them petting that three-legged, lunch box dog.”

The thought that he and Penelope would soon sit down to their usual breakfast of goat’s milk and GMO-free Wheaties quiche made him salivate like Wall Street on Black Friday.

Odysseus we are not. Neither was he.