Morris

“In similar context, I was spending some time in Virginia with the writer Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., whom I had known for more than thirty years and who had always seemed level-headed enough to me. Ed had a Siamese cat he considered to be directly descended from the royal cays in the nineteenth-century court of King Mongkut of Siam. As with James Jones’s stuck-up Parisian cat, this one would vault onto Yoder’s shoulder and then drape himself, in the manner of a fox fur, around his neck. I thought this degrading. This can’t name was Pharaoh, and he communicated with Yoder in low, emphatic, guttered syllables – just sat there in front of his patron and talked. I was actually witness one evening to the owner’s pitting a slice of cantaloupe on the creature’s dish, which he forthwith devoured, then turned to us and, I swear to God, said “Yum! Yum! Yum! Yum!” Yoder replied, “Yum! Yum! Yum! Yum!” right back; then the two of them began conversing in deep, throaty syllables reminiscent of the dialogue in the old B movie Invasion of the Cat Monsters, emphasizing these exchanges by histrionic movements of both their heads. Now, if you see a Pulitzer prize – winning editorialist whom you have known for Lord knows how long standing nostril to nostril with a garrulous cat and talking in the cat’s language, that cannot help but give you pause about the man, and for that matter the cat.”


July 30, 2000