Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [58]
So Sam and I had a good talk about the work he was doing, which was mainly with radio telescopes, and the work I was doing. We told about our children. Things were going well.
We refreshed our memories about neighborhood dogs we had known, dogs which had known us, too. We remembered two bulldogs named Boots and Beans, who were owned by a family named Wales. Boots and Beans used to catch cats and small dogs and pull them in two. I personally witnessed their doing that to a cat of ours.
Sam and I laughed when I told about my father’s sending the message to Mr. Wales that he would shoot Boots and Beans if they ever came into our yard again. Mr. Wales sent back the message that he would shoot Father if Father shot Boots and Beans.
Psychoanalysts are missing important clues about patients’ childhoods if they do not ask about dogs the patients knew; As I have said elsewhere, dogs still seem as respectable and interesting as people to me. Any day.
• • •
Dog poisoning is still the most contemptible crime I can think of. Boots and Beans were poisoned finally, but I couldn’t celebrate that, and our family certainly had nothing to do with it. If we were going to poison anybody, it would have been Mr. Wales.
• • •
The dogs of our childhood were dead when Sam Goldstein and I were reunited in Charlottesville, so we would have been crazy to speculate about what they might be doing nowadays. We could speculate about children we had known, though, since human beings live so long. We would say things like, “What do you suppose ever happened to Nancy Briggs?” or “Where do you think Dick Martin is now?” and on and on. Sometimes one or the other of us had a stale clue or two. Nancy Briggs married a sailor and moved to Texas during the Second World War. How’s that for a clue?
• • •
I have played that game so often in this jerry-built society of ours—“Whatever Became of So-and-so?” It becomes a truly sad game only if someone actually knows in detail what became of several so-and-sos. Several ordinary life stories, if told in rapid succession, tend to make life look far more pointless than it really is, probably.
The people I am most eager to have news of, curiously enough, are those I worked with in the General News Bureau of the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York—from 1948 to 1951, from the time I was twenty-six until I was twenty-nine. They were all men I worked with, but when I think of that good old gang of mine, I include their wives.
As the song from the Gay Nineties, “That Old Gang of Mine,” would have it:
So long forever, old fellows and pals,
So long forever, old sweethearts and gals….
My persisting concern about all those General Electric people is so irrational and deep that I have to suspect that it may have genetic roots of some sort. I may have been born with some sort of clock in me which required me to love those working alongside of me so much at that time. We were just getting our footing as adult citizens, and in other times we might have been correct in thinking that we had better like and trust each other a lot, since we would be together for life.
It was the Darwinian wish of General Electric, of the Free Enterprise System, of course, that we compete instead.
I have heard other people say that they, too, remain irrationally fond of those who were with them when they were just starting out. It’s a common thing.
• • •
One of my closest friends from General Electric is Ollie M. Lyon, who became a vice-president at Young and Rubicam advertising for a while, and then went back to his home state of Kentucky to sell sophisticated silos to farmers. The silos were so airtight that almost no silage was lost to fermentation and vermin and rot.
I loved Ollie’s wife Lavina exactly as much as I loved him, and she died fast of cancer of the pancreas