Willie Morris

My Cat Spit McGee

Willie Morris is Master of the ten-dollar word. Here are a few from the book, although I stopped counting after the first page (d'har):
atavistic
august
minuet
lugubrious
opprobrium
expurgate
prehensile
acerbic
appurtenances
histronic
dalliances
palpitant
callow
proclivity
inveterate
proselytizing
adroit
coquette
ubiquitous
verisimilitude
solicitous
irascible
faubourgs
abject
assuaged
hegemony
avuncular
curry (with attention)
elan
verdant
suzerainty
ersatz
desultory
multifarious
prodigious
sundered
facilely
progemtor
peregrinating
inchoate
modi vivendi

Tell me that isn't wonderful.

What follows are comments referenced by page numbers for the sake of easy discussion:

Pg. 7 Wllie Morris' dog Pete is spotted riding in a car with Truman Capote who we mentioned in class last semester.

Pg. 16: Ernest Hemingway liked cats, a fact that puzzled then "uilurophile" Morris, while fellow Mississippi writer, William Faulkner, disliked them.

Pg. 36: I found this particularly poignant and true: "It is always meloncholy to move away forever from a place where you have dwelled for a very long time, for the past accumulates on you in fading mementos, documents and letters and photographs, reminders of the mortal days... haunting artifacts..." This reminds me of a poem by Eugene Brooks, brother of Allen Ginsberg:

Metronome
Son Lyle (13) sits at piano;
his fingers stampede an "English Country Dance".
A metronome squats near his right shoulder
like an indomitable mahogany heart
cut to the shape of a pyramid.
Click click the metronome
clicks away the years stumbling backward.....
to minutes of a 1936 Paterson afternoon in a second story flat on Haledon Avenue
hilled high above Passaic River,
clicks through the harsh voice of my mother
yelling at me from the kitchen to Practice,
clicks through the sigh of my piano teacher,
flustered Mr. Rizzo's sigh fluttering
like the whisper of gray curtains against the windowpane,
click click
a sofa's flower-printed cover
praises the odor of damp linoleum and lentil soup.
The flat notes of a boxy bronchitic piano
clink through the rustle of fallen leaves. A dog
barks outside in October air. Click
click click.....Lyle stops
the restless triangular heart.
My breath
starts up again like a slow
metronome.

Cat facts I learned from reading Spitter's book:
a) They walk left legs, right legs like only giraffes and camels do.
b) Dogs have been domesticated for 12,000 years. Cats have been domesticated for 5,000 years.
c) Cats first came to America on the Mayflower (to kill rats).

Pg. 65: Morris confesses a "storied distaste for responding to the telephone under all circumstances" and then proceeds to tell of an hilarious crank call he staged involving calling David Duke's campaign headquarters and successfully convincing an ignorant young woman to page, very conspicuously, Ava Braun. (Pg. 66)

Pg. 78: I thought this especially good:
"I began examining her calico spots, black, orange and tan, interspersed with creamy white, which looked so perfectly contrived that even the most adamant disbeliever might have been seduced into seeing in their incredible symmetry the touch of a divine hand."

Pg. 83: Willie asks "What is it, the sisterhood of God's maternal creatures at childbirth?" A romantic view. Very unromantic births are attended weekly at second trimester abortion facilities everywhere.

Pg. 87: I love this concept. It's poetic nonsense, and I've often made similar silly observations (such as, if I were 15 again and ferried by time travel to this point in my life, right here, right now, would I scarce believe it? What would I be thinking?):

"As we traveled down the Old Canton Road, could I have mystically divined then that a mere hundred yards or so away down a side street was the very house in which many years later I would dwell with a beautiful wife and seven cats, including a big white one with one blue eye and one gold? Was it waiting there for me all along?"

Pg. 88: "I have always been obsessed with the classic paradoxes of time, of time warps, of mystical visitations into the distant past... beguiled me with fancies of the human beings who had dewlled here years earlier, along this very creak, on this very property, within this very neighborhood, their lost voices, their transient joys and hopes and fears..." It's this exactly.

Pg. 106: This is classic South imagery: "They sat on the grass in the backyard with R.C. Colas and MoonPies." Willie would have loved this.

Pg. 106: "hail-fellow-well-met"... I hadn't heard it.

Pg. 114: "...I had always been obsessed with old and supple places from my own past and was perpetually returning to them out of remembrance and belonging, a maddening writer's sustenance in such matters, I suppose, and I would return alone to these places time and again and suffuse myself with their lingering secrets." Sustenance for him, a more desperate survival (sometimes) for me.

Pg. 118: Mention of the witch's grave, a local ledgend much like the Bell Witch of Tennessee. A movie was made about the Bell Witch, btw, and the Shakers recorded a creepy album about her. A group of us used to go hear them play in Nashville; I harken back to supple places and times...

Pg. 121: One of many references to the Jitney Jungle apparently a mississippi grocery store.

For a friend who asks: "If heaven is so good, why should we put any value on this life?":
(from Pg. 137):
1. the fine, wholesome aroma of a baking nut cake wafting through the house
2. the sight of beloved furry bundles curled together in front of a fire
3. the poignancy of the passage of one's own time
4. the changing seasons
5. a flowing creek
6. history
7. the throaty croak of a returning bullfrog
8. natural continuity: "The small things are the best part of life, although we seldom acknowledge this in their moment."
9. Saturday afternoons in highest autumn
10. leaves of a dozen falling colors
11. the brisk, cool air of fall
12. distant sounds coming from very far away (for me, any ol' train will do)

God has provided inumerable small things whose value is inestimable. The provision itself speaks to the value of this life. The answer then to the question is as it has always been: We value this life because God, Who has paid meticulous attention to life's detail, does. No matter how wonderful heaven is, the small things of this life-even apparent in the midst of struggle and suffering-are not, if it can at all be helped, to be missed!

A character in the movie Perfect Storm claims there is no death but only love. Eudora Welty, a fellow Mississipian, observes that life is "nothing but the continuity of its love." Life is important because it is an expression of God's love, and he is a sad fool that rejects such a Love.

Pg. 140: This made me cry:
"We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle..." ~Irving Townsend
It affects me on a deeper level than a keeper of furrly little friends. Instead I am a mother in a waiting room with my name on a strangers' lips, and my tightening circle is crashing to the floor.

A few verses for those who want to understand why we understand what we understand as we understand it:

1 Corinthians 6:13
6:15a
19 and 20
from my Bible's introduction to 1 Corinthians:

"How we live is important - we must not abuse the grace of God. It is not enough to say that we are Christians. We must also act like Christians: not to do so is to bring dishonor to Christ."

Which reminds me of the lyrics: "When I fall I bring Your Name down."

Visit Willie's grave.
(Notice the black snake on Willie's fresh mound.)