she could never have a normal litter and could not safely risk another pregnancy.
I did not get another kitten. In 1972 I was ninety years old (although I admitted
only to fifty-nine… and tried my darnedest – exercise and diet and posture and
cosmetics and clothes – to look forty). Being ninety in fact, it was possible, even
likely, that another kitten would outlive me. I chose not to risk that.
I moved to Albuquerque because it had no ghosts for me. Kansas City was choked with
ghosts of my past, of every sort, both sad and happy. I preferred not to drive by a
site, such as our old home on Benton Boulevard, or where our old farmhouse out south
had once been, then driving past would cover the happy used-to-be with dreary or
unrecognisable what-is.
I preferred to remember Central High School the way it had been when my children
attended it. In those days the scholastic records of Central’s graduates at West
Point and Annapolis and MIT and other ‘tough’ schools caused Central to be rated as
the finest secondary school in the west, equal in academics to the best preparatory
schools, such as Groton or Lawrenceville – instead of what it had become: mostly
babysitting for overgrown infants, a place where police prowl cars gathered every
afternoon to stop fights, to confiscate knives, and to shake down the ‘students’ for
drugs – a ‘high school’ where half the students should never have been allowed to
graduate from grammar school because they could not read or write well enough to get
along in the world outside.
Albuquerque held no ghosts for me; I had never lived them I had no children living
there, no grandchildren. (Great-grandchildren? Well, maybe.) Albuquerque had had the
good fortune (from my point of view) to be bypassed by moving roadway Route
Sixty-Six. The old paved road numbered route 66 and once called ‘The Main Street of
America’ had run straight through Albuquerque, but roadcity Route Sixty-Six was
miles to the south; one could not hear it or see it.
Albuquerque was favoured also through having been bypassed by many of the ills of
the Crazy Years. Despite its size – 180.000 and growing smaller because of the
roadcity south of it; such shrinkage was usual – it continued to have the sweet
small-town feeling so common in the early twentieth century, so scarce in the second
half. It was the home of the main campus of the University of New Mexico… a school
blessed with a chancellor who had not given in to the nonsense of the sixties.
Students there had rioted (some of them) just once; Dr Macintosh kicked them out and
they stayed kicked out. Parents screamed and complained at the state capital in
Santa Fe; Dr Macintosh told the trustees and the legislature that there would be
order and civilised behaviour on the campus as long as he was in charge. If they did
not have the guts to back him up, he would leave at once and they could hire some
masochistic wimp who enjoyed presiding over a madhouse. They backed him up.
In 1970 at campuses all over America half of all freshmen (or more) were required to
take a course called ‘English A’ (or something similar) but known everywhere as
‘Bonehead English’. When Dr Macintosh became chancellor, he abolished Bonghead
English and refused to admit students who would have been required to take it. He
announced, ‘It costs the taxpayers a minimum of seventeen thousand dollars a year to
keep a student on this campus. Reading, writing, spelling, and grammar are grammar
school subjects. If an applicant for admission to this university does not know
these grammar school subjects well enough to get along here, let him go back to the
grammar school that had dumped him untaught. He does not belong here. I refuse to
waste tax money on him.’
Again parents screamed – but the parents of these subliterate applicants were a
minority, while the majority of voters and legislators were discovering that they
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liked what they heard from Chancellor Macintosh.
After Dr Macintosh revised the university prospectos, it carried a warning that