My Cat Spit Mcgee

Willie Morris

ISBN 10: 0375503218 / ISBN 13: 9780375503214

Edité par Random House, 1999

A propos de cet article

Willie Morris never liked catsindeed, he had a loathing of cats going back to his childhood. Willie was always a dog man, as were almost all of the people he knew.My Dog Skip, his moving tribute to the dog he loved in boyhood, became an instant classic and then a captivating film. And when his beloved black Lab, Pete, died, and his friends asked, 'Will you get another dog?' Willie replied, 'No, I'll get another wife first.' And that is precisely what happenedthe wife part, anyway. But the woman Willie married turned out to be a cat woman, and on their first Christmas together, a little white waif found starving in a ditch off old Highway 51 outside Jackson, Mississippi, crept out from behind their Christmas tree with a red Yuletide ribbon around her neck. Willie was horrified, but that kitten eventually became the mother of Spit McGee, who is the subject of this surprising, beguiling, and altogether winning book. When Spit McGee was three weeks old, he almost died, but he was saved by Willie with a little help from Clinic Cat, who gave him a blood transfusion. Spit McGee was tied to Willie thereafter, a fount of affection, loyalty, crankiness, and enigmanot to mention high and resilient intelligence. Spit has one blue eye and one golden eye. Although folk wisdom has it that a cat with different colored eyes is deaf, Spit McGee, according to Willie, could pick up a dinner conversation in Memphis, two hundred miles away. My Cat Spit McGeevividly describes what Willie learned about cats over the yearstheir habits, eccentricities, and resourcefulness, the ways in which they have been irrevocably shaped by their long-ago jungle origin, and how they differ from dogs. The result is an endearing, story-filled celebration of the love that millions of others have for their cats. It honors, too, an abiding comradeship, and Willie's and Spit's daily adventures as they tried to fathom each other. My Cat Spit McGeeis the memorable sequel toMy Dog Skipand one of the finest books ever written about a cat.

N° de réf. du vendeur 9780375503214

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: My Cat Spit Mcgee
• Éditeur: Random House
• Date de parution: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0375503218
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780375503214
• Reliure: Hardcover
• État de l'article: New

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

Book by Morris Willie

Extrait

I would be sitting in my chair at the house at Northside and Normandy and his habit was to approach the chair, position himself between my feet and look up longingly at me. Then he would climb my leg into my lap. A dozen or more times a night he would do this. That was when I started trying seriously to talk to him, as he sat in my lap on these evenings. I would talk to him about my dogs Skip and Pete, or what
I had done that day, or an Atlanta Braves game I was watching on TV, and he would stare at me, and blink his eyes, and make the incomprehensible movements of his tail and whiskers. This might suggest how radically far I had come, to be actually trying to converse with a kitten.

Then one night after playing outdoors, he did not come home. He was gone for several hours. I had read somewhere of the high mortality rates of kittens and young cats: killed by dogs, run over, lost far from home, wounded by sadistic Homo sapiens. We had purposefully decided to let him, as with his mother, Rivers Applewhite, go outdoors on his own, and now I was disturbed by that decision. He had almost died at birth, and then most certainly would have done so two weeks later had it not been for Clinic Cat, and this now was the third of a succession of traumas we would have with him over time. I walked from house to house in the neighborhood. I got in the car and roamed the vicinity looking for him. I remembered with lucid anathema how Skip had disappeared in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in 1944, and Pete in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1982, and I wanted none of that now. When I was getting down to writing about this, the Cat Woman reminded me of the episode in searing particulars: "You wouldn't speak to me. You told me it was my fault because I'd gotten you involved with a damned cat and you couldn't deal with him. You said you didn't begin to understand cats and were sick and tired of them. You closed yourself in your room. Just like anytime anything happened to one of our cats later on, you were nuts. And you, the cat hater! We'd given up on Spit. Late that night, we were crying and discussing all the details of his short little life."

And then, right in that instant, we heard a faint noise outside the front window. It sounded like meeow. I went to the window. And there was Spit McGee.