I think we will try a powerhouse again this winter. Often they have supplies of coal large enough to last us through the cold weather without extra foraging.
Cataclysm began in 1954, June 13 to be exact. That was the day my second child was born, a boy we named Kevin.
It is surprising that a man who was the father of two children should accuse himself of depopulating the Earth. And yet it is because I was the father of two children that it happened.
Pre-natal care of mothers and post-natal care of infants were subjects of compelling interest in those days, arriving monthly in the burgeoning women's magazines and annually in the proliferous child-care manuals. Pediatricians and mothers besieged parents with advice, and we consumed everything with catholic appetite: logical, illogical, sensible, insensible, nonsensical, self-contradictory.
They kept us on our toes, strung as taut as Stradivarius violins, afraid to act for fear we would do the wrong thing, afraid not to act for fear inaction would be disastrous. Pediatricians and mothers, always the same authors. Never were there any articles on the care of mother and child by a father, only by what I came to think of as the vested interests.
I was slow, I admit; but what father has not been slow? Who, if he had not been slow, would be a father?
The books and the articles would have been troublesome enough if the information they imparted had been accurate. But slowly I became aware that they were subtly interwoven with mis-statements.
I raveled them out, I categorized them. I counted five different kinds before I convinced myself.
A mother published this: "One baby takes up all your time—two can't take any more."