Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, noted that while Phyllis transplanted and reseeded an entire garden from the starter device on the kitchen counter to pots on a windowsill, the keeper took on the project of replacing a broken hinge on an antique blanket chest/coffee table, a simple task that should take twenty minutes or so.
Hours later, long after Phyllis relaxed from her efficiently completed project, the keeper was making his second trip to the hardware store to exchange a right-side lid holder for a left-sided one, had tools strewn over much of the living-room couch, was developing an annoying cramp in his neck from leaning over to peer into the dim interior of the blanket chest where he was fumbling to see just what the hell he was doing, or, more accurately, not doing.
Over his long fix-anything life, often including extreme procrastination of course, the keeper has been proud of his restorative abilities, even flaunting them with duct-tape type inventiveness.
But something has happened, something acceptable only when the alternative is considered–the keeper got old, with all that goes along with “emeritus” status. In the amount of time in which he once could frame up an addition to the house, or Phyllis could move a garden, the keeper blew most of an afternoon on the twenty-minute repair job of a blanket chest lid.
“Done” is the operative word here: the lid repair is done, but the keeper isn’t—diminished as a fixer perhaps, but not done.
