ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, in this era of “to-mask-or-not-to-mask,” passes along the keeper’s account of a sad unmasking when he–the keeper was unmasked by the cruel passage of time as not the Lone Ranger but a skinny farm kid astride the world’s orneriest Shetland pony, named Silver, of course.
All of which explains the keeper’s use of his youthful Lone Ranger identity to title a book—a compilation of columns and stories from the Milwaukee Journal, as “Hi-ho Silver Anyway;” and to put on the cover an illustration of himself astride his “Silver,” who was only happy when left in the barn with a generous supply of oats, and frequently bucked off the Lone Ranger and galloped solo back to the barn and the oats. (The keeper subsequently learned that Silver had very recently been surgically retired from stud duty which might have figured into his moodiness.)
In his Lone Ranger gear and get up, the keeper does not remember a mask, but certainly there had to be one, perhaps to be worn so the neighbors would not recognize him as he walked home through the mud after an involuntary “Silver” dismount.
Time as the Great unmasker finds the keeper and Phyllis still using their Covid masks as they subject themselves to a world as unpredictable and ornery as an oats-addicted, recently neutered Shetland pony.
