“On Christmas morning the little kitten was lapping milk from a bowl on the floor. She turned and looked at me, and I looked back at her. It was the genesis of a most unfamiliar relationship.”
— Willie Morris (1999)
Roy walked into the Oktibbeha County Courthouse and said he’d been reading about my animals, the cats, ducks and rabbits. Said he wasn’t much of a cat person though. Then he started telling me about his cat.
“We have a cat at our house,” he said, “It seems to have taken up with me.”
We started talking predators around our houses and how vigilance was required when cats were outside. Roy said, “Yeah, though we live in town there’s 80 acres of woods behind our house. I’ve seen a lot of hawks. So when our cat goes outside, I go too and watch over it.”
I thought Roy was sounding more and more like a cat person, though he wouldn’t admit it.
“You see, the cat’s been declawed and it wouldn’t have a chance against a hawk.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just this morning Sam was sitting in the driveway at 4:30 a.m. waiting for his fishing buddy. He said about 15 feet from the water faucet where he cleans his fish cooler was a fox. Then when he pulled out the driveway he saw an owl. This was all just feet from the house where the kittens were.”
Then I told Roy I thought he sounded a lot like Willie Morris who hated cats; then he married JoAnn. He called her “the Cat Woman.”
The mention of Willie Morris brought back Roy’s memories of law school and how after class he’d go down to the Gin for a beer and Willie’d be sitting at the end of the bar. Now when Roy said the Gin, being from the Delta, I was thinking a cotton gin but quickly realized that’s not what he meant.
Roy told a few stories, and I told about the book signing where I sat with Willie for a long time eating lemon cookies and drinking sparkling white grape juice. Seems there was a football game in town and almost no one showed up at the book signing. I got a picture of me with Willie and later a postcard from him. He called me a word I had to look up in the dictionary, “ineffable.” I still have the word marked in my dictionary, and I saved the postcard.
At home I pulled out Willie’s book, “My Cat Spit McGee.” Chapter Two is called “How I Hated Cats.” The following is the first paragraph. Be prepared to look up words:
“I was always not only a cat misanthrope, I took pride in being one. Did I consider liking cats unmanly? Cat lovers, I would later read somewhere, are called ‘ailurophiles,’ and those who hate cats, ‘ailurophobes.’ Allow me to introduce myself here as one of North America’s top-ranking ailurophobes of that period.”
And well, the rest is history, or at least there’s a book about a hard-headed man who admittedly loved a cat.
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