from 12 th and Walnut, much further away.)
‘Uh… Not very long.’
‘Then you’d better hurry or my husband will catch you at it. If you really do mean
to do this to me:
‘Oh, the hell with it!’ He abruptly let go of me, turned away and headed for the
front door.
He was fumbling with the latch when I called out, `You forgot your kitten!’
‘Keep the damned cat!’
That is how I ‘bought’ Random Numbers.
Raising kittens is fun, but raising children is the most fun – if the children
happen to be your own – if you happen to be the sort of person who enjoys bearing
and rearing children. For Jubal was right; it is subjective, a matter of one’s
individual disposition. I had seventeen children on my first go-around and greatly
enjoyed rearing all of them – each different, each individual – and I’ve had more
since my rescue and rejuvenation, and have enjoyed them even more because Lazarus
Long’s household is organised so that taking care of babies is easy for everyone.
But I often find other people’s children repulsive and their mothers crashing bores,
especially when they talk about their disgusting offspring (instead of listening to
me talking about mine). It seems to me that many of those little monsters should
have been drowned at birth. They strike me as compelling arguments for birth
control. As my father pointed out years ago, I am an amoral wretch… who does not
necessarily regard an unfinished human being, wet and soiled and smelly at one end
and yelling at the other, as ‘adorable’.
In my opinion many babies are simply bad-tempered, mean little devils who grow up to
be bad-tempered, mean big devils. Look around you. The sweet innocence of children
is a myth. Dean Swift had an appropriate solution for some of them in A Modest
Proposal: But he should not Nave limited it to the Irish, as there are many
scoundrels who are not Irish.
Now you may be so prejudiced and opinionated that you feel that my children are less
than perfect – despite the overwhelming evidence that mine were born with halos and
cherubs’ wings. So I won’t bore you with every time Nancy brought home straight A’s
on her report cards. Practically every time, that is. My kids are smarter than your
kids. Prettier, too. Is that enough? All right, I’ll drop the matter. My kids are
wonderful to me, and your kids are wonderful to you, and let’s leave it at that, and
not bore each other.
I mentioned the Panic of 1907 when I told about Betty Lou’s marriage to Nelson but
at the time I had no idea that a panic was coming. Nor did Brian, or Nelson, or
Betty Lou. But history does repeat itself, somewhat and in some ways, and something
that happened in early 1907 reminded me of something that happened in 1893.
After the birth of Georgie on Betty Lou’s wedding day, I stayed at home as usual,
for a while, but as soon as I felt up to moving around, I left my brood with Betty
Lou and went downtown. I planned to go by streetcar, was unsurprised when Nelson
volunteered to drive me down in his Reo runabout. I accepted and bundled up warm;
the Reo was rather too well ventilated; it had an open buggy somewhere in its
ancestry.
Page 94
Heinlein, Robert A – To Sail Beyond the Sunset.txt
My purpose was to move my savings account. I had placed it in the Missouri Savings
Bank in 1899, when we married and settled in Kansas City, by a draft on the First
State Bank of Butler (the booming metropolis of Thebes had no banks), where Father
had helped me to open a savings account when we carne back from Chicago. By the time
I was married, it had grown to more than a hundred dollars.
Footnote: if I had more than a hundred dollars in a savings account, why did I serve
my family fried mush for their evening meal? Answer: do you think I am crazy? In
1906 in the American Middle West, a sure way for a wife spiritually to castrate her