Clearwater.
What’s so wrong with this? we asked each other.
By the next day we had located and rented a little frame house on Acacia Street on Clearwater Beach, two blocks from the Gulf, owned by a friendly and generous lady named Mrs. Payne. By the followingday we were reasonably well settled in, and Johnny had started school. We sent for the cats. On the third day an officer of the law arrived with a warrant for a traffic violation. Under nature of violation was written: Child in school. You have to wear Florida plates to enjoy that privilege.
We wondered how the cats would weather the trip down and how they would adjust to the semi-tropics.
• • SEVEN • •
Though it was certainly not long ago, shipping pets by Railway Express was a far more plausible venture in the late forties and first half of the fifties than it is today. The cost of shipping two big cats in a big plywood crate with wire windows at either end was not exorbitant. You would cover the box floor with tom paper, fasten their water dishes and food dishes solidly into the corners, tack a sack of canned food with can opener to the outside, and glue simple feeding instructions to the outside. Railway Express would fasten a card to the crate upon which employees en route would write the day and time they were fed and watered, and sign their names.
The cats would ride from Utica to Florida and back in an average two and a half days and arrive in a state so mildly traumatic that a couple of hours would see them back to normal.
But each year the rates went up, and each year the train schedules worsened, and each year the men along the way seemed to give less of a damn about a pair of damn cats, and they arrived in increasingly worse condition until, finally, it became impossible.
So this, too, relates to the myth of our ever increasing standard of living. We live in a culture where service is increasingly slovenly, surly, and reluctant, where schedules mean less and less, where everyspecies of life including the human animal is held in less esteem each year, where all the glossy gadgetry disintegrates at an ever increasing rate, where mediocrity in all things has become a goal—with all excellence suspect.
There is nothing mysterious, of course, about this accelerated decline. My sixth-grade geography teacher told us that the individual life was cheap and cruelly used in China because of the terrible population density of four hundred millions of them. Today we approach half that number in less than half the space, so that the mass insularity of the anthill is the inevitable result. Thirty-seven witnesses can watch a woman murdered. Millions of kids can learn group adjustment as if it were a commendable skill. Over half the humans in the world have no memory of World War II. In an acceleration of the technologies, it is cheaper to repeat experimentations than to conduct a search for previous results. As life gets ever more inconvenient, trashified, and irritating, it is possible to convince through electronic repetition the brand-new millions that everything is, in fact, getting better and better and better.
It is still possible to ship pets. One purchases an approved crate constructed of light metal. One drives the necessary distance to a major airport where there will be a direct flight to the major airport nearest the destination. One makes the air-express arrangements, confirms the loading, then phones someone at the far end to go to the airport and arrange to receive the animals. It is wise to get the proper tranquilizers from the vet so the animals’ response to extreme trauma will be dulled. And be prepared for heavy expense. This is yet another one of the conveniences of the jet age.
A pleasant voice over the telephone told us that a box of cats had arrived, and we drove at once to the Railway Express office in Clearwater, put the car top down, and loaded the rather fetid crate into the back seat.
What’s so wrong with this? we asked each other.
By the next day we had located and rented a little frame house on Acacia Street on Clearwater Beach, two blocks from the Gulf, owned by a friendly and generous lady named Mrs. Payne. By the followingday we were reasonably well settled in, and Johnny had started school. We sent for the cats. On the third day an officer of the law arrived with a warrant for a traffic violation. Under nature of violation was written: Child in school. You have to wear Florida plates to enjoy that privilege.
We wondered how the cats would weather the trip down and how they would adjust to the semi-tropics.
• • SEVEN • •
Though it was certainly not long ago, shipping pets by Railway Express was a far more plausible venture in the late forties and first half of the fifties than it is today. The cost of shipping two big cats in a big plywood crate with wire windows at either end was not exorbitant. You would cover the box floor with tom paper, fasten their water dishes and food dishes solidly into the corners, tack a sack of canned food with can opener to the outside, and glue simple feeding instructions to the outside. Railway Express would fasten a card to the crate upon which employees en route would write the day and time they were fed and watered, and sign their names.
The cats would ride from Utica to Florida and back in an average two and a half days and arrive in a state so mildly traumatic that a couple of hours would see them back to normal.
But each year the rates went up, and each year the train schedules worsened, and each year the men along the way seemed to give less of a damn about a pair of damn cats, and they arrived in increasingly worse condition until, finally, it became impossible.
So this, too, relates to the myth of our ever increasing standard of living. We live in a culture where service is increasingly slovenly, surly, and reluctant, where schedules mean less and less, where everyspecies of life including the human animal is held in less esteem each year, where all the glossy gadgetry disintegrates at an ever increasing rate, where mediocrity in all things has become a goal—with all excellence suspect.
There is nothing mysterious, of course, about this accelerated decline. My sixth-grade geography teacher told us that the individual life was cheap and cruelly used in China because of the terrible population density of four hundred millions of them. Today we approach half that number in less than half the space, so that the mass insularity of the anthill is the inevitable result. Thirty-seven witnesses can watch a woman murdered. Millions of kids can learn group adjustment as if it were a commendable skill. Over half the humans in the world have no memory of World War II. In an acceleration of the technologies, it is cheaper to repeat experimentations than to conduct a search for previous results. As life gets ever more inconvenient, trashified, and irritating, it is possible to convince through electronic repetition the brand-new millions that everything is, in fact, getting better and better and better.
It is still possible to ship pets. One purchases an approved crate constructed of light metal. One drives the necessary distance to a major airport where there will be a direct flight to the major airport nearest the destination. One makes the air-express arrangements, confirms the loading, then phones someone at the far end to go to the airport and arrange to receive the animals. It is wise to get the proper tranquilizers from the vet so the animals’ response to extreme trauma will be dulled. And be prepared for heavy expense. This is yet another one of the conveniences of the jet age.
A pleasant voice over the telephone told us that a box of cats had arrived, and we drove at once to the Railway Express office in Clearwater, put the car top down, and loaded the rather fetid crate into the back seat.
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