raise in price by the pound – I repeat, by the pound, not by the loaf – of at least
twenty per cent?’
‘Find yourself another sucker, sister; I already bet on the election. I was thinking
about meat prices.’
`Up. Oh, just a penny or two a pound, but it goes on. But I’ve noticed something
else. Mr Schontz used to include a soup bone without being asked. And some liver for
Random. Suet for birds in the winter. Now those things happen only if I ask for them
and, when I do, he doesn’t smile. Just this week he said that he was going to have
to start charging for liver as people were beginning to eat it, not just cats. I
don’t know how I’m going to explain this to Random.’
‘Let’s keep first things first, my love; my wedding present must be fed. How you
behave towards cats here below determines your status in Heaven.’
`Really?’
‘That’s straight out of the Bible; you can look it up. Have you talked to Nelson
about cat food?’
`It would not occur to me to do so. Betty Lou, yes; Nelson, no.’
`Just remember that he is a professional economist concerning the growing and
marketing of foodstuffs and he has a handsome sheepskin to prove it. Nel tells me
that, starting any time now, cats and dogs are going to have their own food industry
– fresh food, packaged food, canned food, special stores or special departments in
stores, and national advertising. Big business. Millions of dollars. Even hundreds
of millions:
`Are you sure he wasn’t joking? Nelson will joke about anything.’
‘I don’t think he was. He was quite serious and he had figures to back his remarks.
You have seen how gasoline powered machinery has been displacing horses, not just
here in the city, but on farms – slowly but more each year. So we have out-of-work
horses. Nelson says not to worry about those horses; the cats will eat them.’
‘What a horrid thought!’
At Brian’s urging I worked up a chart that told me how grocery prices were rising.
Fortunately I had thirteen years of exact records of what I had spent on food, what
items, how much per pack, or pound, or dozen, etc. Briney had never required me to
do it but it matched what my mother had done and it truly was a great help to me
during those years of pinching every penny to know just what return I had received
in food for each cent I had spent.
So I worked up this big chart, then figured out what a year’s ration was, per
person, as if I were feeding an army – so many ounces of flour, so many ounces of
butter, sugar, meat, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits – not much for canned goods as I
had learned, early on, that the only economical way to get canned goods was by
canning stuff myself.
Eventually I produced a curve, the cost of a ration for one adult, 1899-1913.
It was a fairly smooth curve, trending steadily up, and with inflexure upwards.
There were minor discontinuities but, on the whole, it was a smooth first-order
curve.
I looked at that curve and it tempted me. I got down my old text for analytical
geometry, from Thebes High School, measured some ordinates, abscissas, and slopes –
plugged in the figures and wrote down the equation.
And stared at it. Had I actually derived a formula by which food prices could be
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predicted? Something the big brains with Ph.D.s and endowed chairs could not agree
on?
No, no, Maureen! There is not a crop failure on there, not a war, not any major
disaster. Not enough facts. Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. There are lies,
damned lies, and statistics. Don’t make too much stew from one oyster.
I put my analytical work away where no one would find it. But I kept that chart. I
did not use it for prediction but I did keep plotting that curve because it let me
go to Briney and show him exactly why I needed a larger allowance, whenever I did –