I am well aware from the very beginning of this colloquy between you and I that I cannot expect your sophisticated, and shall we say predetermined mind to accept the position I am in without total rejection. But I beg of you to withhold your disbelief as well as your unrestrained laughter and afford me the opportunity of fully revealing my condition before you arrive at a final misjudgement of a situation of which you do not possess one iota of comprehension, dammit! I did not accomplish this on my own, and who did I cannot say, and what will come of it I cannot tell, but it is a fact. I am a cat. With total recall. In some ways that is a help, in others it is a hell.

   Please restrain your impulse to depart because I am desperate for your confidence as I am about to expose additional information that may astonish you further. Before I was a cat I was a person. My name was Morris Minsky. Moe for short. When Moe died, whatever may happen to souls this is what happened to his, and though you may remain skeptical (and I don't blame you), Moe was changed, or made over, or put back as a cat. Me. Mokie.

   Among the many exceptional attributes Moe had, he was also a hip character, if I may employ the vernacular current at the time, besides being an inveterate teller of tales. It became apparent to me that the main reason I must have been - I hesitate to use the word - reincarnated, was to insure the preservation of those tales. How, you may well ask, can a cat, even a hip cat, be expected to tell stories? He can't. But the mysterious powers we all worship in some form or another, even if only to avoid being looked down upon as pagans, have enabled me to discover a mouthpiece for Moe, and God only knows what he thinks about all this. But here they are, Moe Minsky's marvelous "mysess."

   And if you don't know what that means, ask anybody in Katz's delicatessen.