Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, assists the keeper in making something of his—the keeper’s memory of the March afternoon when most of the student body of the country school trudged across the deep melting snow of Becker’s woods to see the bloated body of the beaver that had been trapped when the tree it was cutting had obviously slipped off its stump and landed on the beaver’s tail, effectively dooming the unfortunate animal to starvation.
The images of the country kids gathered in the woods staring down at the dead beaver are as clear as if they were made yesterday instead of 75 or more years ago, and they come to the fore now as news comes of a bomb-scare shut-down at the high school across the street from where the keeper and Phyllis now reside.
In his eternal flailing to attach significance to missteps and stumbles, the keeper offers this: making a bomb-scare phone call marks you as a narcissistic fool; getting your tail fatally pinned as you go about honest work marks you as simply a victim of bad luck.
Life comes with lots of both: fools and bad luck; and the keeper suggests that otherwise it might be deadly boring—but worth striving for, of course.
