Some ARE BORN TO GREATNESS. OTHERS HAVE greatness thrust upon them. Then there's Evelyn Gabai. An opossum was thrust upon her, and she's never looked back.
Gabai, a curly-haired woman of 44, lives in Van Nuys and writes scripts for television animation. Apart from a fondness for critters that goes back to her New England youth, her life was proceeding in more or less normal fashion until 15 years ago. That's when a friend found an ailing mammal -- cat-sized and pink-nosed, with a long, hairless tail and dozens and dozens of teeth. The friend invited her over to have a look.
You know opossums: those furry, toothy, long-tailed beasts that occasionally turn up in the glare of your high beams or the dark recesses of your yard. They are the only marsupials found in North America, and if you look closely instead of shuddering and turning away when the high beam finds one, you may catch a mother carrying her young in a pouch or on her back.
This is what Gabai's friend had and what Gabai saw. The angels sang.
"I was just hooked," she remembers. "It was so docile and sweet."
Gabai still spends much of her time walking and talking like the rest of us in this ostensibly denatured city. But in fact, she is an agent of the wilderness. As a volunteer counselor for the Opossum Society of the United States (www.opossumsocietyus.org), she harbors opossum orphans, cleanses opossum wounds, gives opossum talks and of course fights opossum ignorance and opossum oppression wherever she finds it.
Now, make no mistake: Whether alive in your yard or dead on the roadside, these animals are commonly counted among nature's least charismatic mammals. Yet Didelphis marsupialis does something for Gabai.
"Do you know why we call them opossums and the rest of the world calls them possums?" she asks. "When we first started colonizing this country, Miles Standish was keeping a book of native species, and he asked somebody, 'What's that?' And they said, 'Oh, possum.' " (I was not only unable but also unwilling to test the veracity of this story.)
Do you suspect your neighbors of possessing insufficient knowledge of the opossum? Gabai will be right over. I met her on such a night, at a gathering of the Franklin Hills Residents Assn., just south of Griffith Park.
"The opossum has been in your neighborhood for a long time," she began perkily, facing an auditorium full of skepticism. "Roughly 70 million years."
