that I think of it. When I get home, I must ask Ishtar and Justin how much of
Galahad derives from Nelson. Since we Howards started with a limited gene pool,
convergence, along with probability and chance, often comes close to physically
reincarnating a remote ancestor in some descendant on Tertius or Secundus.)
Which reminds me of what I did with part of my time and how Random Numbers got his
name.
I don’t think there was ever a month in the first half of the twentieth century but
what both Briney and I were studying something… and usually studying a language
besides, which hardly counts; we had to stay ahead of our children. We usually did
not study the same thing – Briney did not study shorthand or ballet; I did not study
petroleum extraction methods or evaporation control in irrigation. But study we did.
I studied because I had been left with a horrid feeling of intellectual coitus
interruptos through not being able to go on to college at least through a bachelor’s
degree, and Brian studied because, well, because he was a Renaissance man with all
knowledge his field. According to the Archives my first husband lasted one hundred
and nineteen years. It is a cinch bet that he was studying some subject new to him
the last few weeks of his life.
Sometimes we studied together. In 1906 he started in on statistics, probability and
chance by mail, the ICS school – and here were the books and the lessons in our
house, so Maureen did them, too, all but mailing my work in. So we were both
immersed in this most fascinating field of mathematics when our kitten, Random
Numbers, joined our lives, courtesy of Mr Renwick, driver salesman for the Great
Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.
The kitten was an adorable mass of silver grey fluff and was at first named Fluffy
Ruffles through an error in sex; she was a he. But he demonstrated such lightning
changes in mood, direction, speed, and action that Brian remarked, `That kitten
doesn’t have a brain; he just has a skull full of random numbers, and whenever he
bangs his head into a chair or ricochets off a wall, it shakes up the random numbers
and causes him to do something else.’
So Fluffy Ruffles became Random Numbers or Random or Randie.
As soon as the snow was gore in the spring of ’07 we installed a croquet lawn in our
back yard. At first it was played by us four adults. (Over the years it was played
by everyone.) Then it was four adults and Random Numbers. Every time a ball was hit
that kitten would draw his sword and charge! He would overtake the ball and throw
himself on it, grabbing it, all four limbs. Imagine, please, a grown man stopping a
rolling hogshead by throwing himself around it. Better imagine football pads and a
helmet for him.
Random wore no pads; he went into action wearing nothing but fluff and his do-or-die
attitude. That ball must be stopped, and it was up to him to do it – Allah il Allah
Akbar!
Only one solution – Lock up the cat while playing croquet. But Betty Lou would not
permit that.
Very well, add to the roles this special ground rule: anything done to a croquet
ball by a cat, good or bad, was part of the natural hazards; you played it that way.
I remember one day when Nelson picked up the cat and cradled it in his left arm,
then used his mallet with one hand. Not only did it not help him – Random jumped out
of his arm and landed ahead of the bail, causing Nelson to accomplish nothing – but
we also convened a special session of the Supreme Croquet Court and ruled that
picking up a cat in an attempt to influence the odds was unfair to cats and an
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offence against nature and must be punished by flogging the villain around the
regimental square.
Nelson pleaded youth and inexperience and long and faithful service and got off with