in town, indeed before we knew that he had left the Army.
Five years later he did move in with us because we needed him.
In the 1900s Kansas City was an exciting place. Despite three months in Chicago ten
years earlier I was not used to a big city. When I went there as a bride, Kansas
City had one hundred and fifty thousand people in it. There were electric
streetcars, almost as many automobiles as horse-drawn vehicles, trolley wires and
telephone wires and power wires everywhere. All of the main streets were paved and
more of the side streets were being paved each year; the park system was already
famous worldwide and still not finished. The public library had (unbelievable!)
nearly half a million volumes.
Kansas City’s Convention Hall was so big that the Democratic party was scheduled to
hold its 1900 presidential nominating convention in it – then it burned down
overnight and its reconstruction was underway before the ashes were cold and the
Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan in that hall just ninety days later.
Meanwhile the Republicans renominated President McKinley and, with him, Colonel
Teddy Roosevelt, heroe of San Juan hill. I don’t know for whom my husband voted…
but it never seemed to displease him when someone would notice a resemblance between
him and Teddy Roosevelt.
I think Briney would have told me, had I asked – but in 1900 politics was not a
woman’s business, and I was doing my utter best to simulate publicly the perfect
modest housewife, interested only in kirk, kitchen, and kids as the Kaiser put it.
(Kische, Küche, und Kinder.)
Then in September 1901, only six months into his second term, our President was
murdered most vilely… and the dashing young war hero was precipitated into the
highest Office.
There are time lines in which Mr McKinley was not assassinated and Col. Roosevelt
was never president, and his distant cousin was not nominated in 1932, which utterly
changes the patterns of wars, both in 1917 and 1941. Our Time Corps mathematicians
deal with these matters, but the structural simulations are large even for the new
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computer complex combining Mycroft Holmes IV with Pallas Athene, and are quite
beyond me. I’m a baby factory, a good cook, and I aim to be a panic in bed. It seems
to me that the secret of happiness in life is to know what you are and then be
content to be that, in style, head up and proud, and not yearn to be something else.
Ambition can never change a sparrow into a hawk, or a wren into a bird of paradise.
I’m a Jenny Wren; it suits me.
Pixel is a fine example of being what he is in style. His tail is always up and he
is always sure of himself. Today he brought me still another mouse, so I praised him
and petted him, and kept the mouse until he left, then flushed it away.
A midnight thought finally surfaced. These mice are the first proof anyone has had
(I’m almost sure) that Pixel can take anything with him when he grasps a probability
and walks through walls (if that describes what he does – well, at least it labels
it).
What message can I send, and to whom, and how can I fasten it to him?
In shifting from school girl to housewife I had to add to Maureen’s private
decalogue. One was: thou shalt always live within thy household allowance. Another I
formulated earlier: thou shalt not let thy children see thee cry – and when it
became clear that Brian would have to be away frequently, I added him in. Never let
him see me cry and be sure to offer him a smiling face when he returns… don’t,
Don’t, DONT sour his return with fiddling details about how a pipe froze, or the
grocer boy was rude, or see what that dadratted dog did to my pansy bed. Make him
happy to come home, sorry to have to leave.
Do let children welcome him; don’t let them smother him. He wants a mother for his