Selena N. B. H. from Fayetteville, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, sympathizes with the keeper as he—the keeper, suffers from “time” contortions as he attempts to deal with the fact of his youngest child—Mike, celebrating a 65th birthday. The math would make the keeper’s age…….oh, never mind! Suffice to say that it is only a number, albeit a damn big one.
Among the grab-bag of inventive genes that the keeper handed off to Mike were those that some years ago had the two of them boarding a specially remodeled pontoon boat near Sauk City with plans to float the Wisconsin and Mississippi down to New Orleans; and then getting only as far as Arena where they had to be rescued after the river level dropped 18 inches as they slept during their second night out, leaving them stranded on a totally waterless sandbar.
The record for this form of misfortune goes back to Mike’s teen years when he fell off the roof of the house one night while trying to sneak out to see a forbidden girlfriend; or when he spilled gun powder on the keeper’s work bench while dismantling shotgun shells to make “bombs” and there was a subsequent unexpected work-bench explosion that singed the keeper’s eyebrows and may have done permanent damage to his mental equilibrium.
The list of Mike’s youthful transgressions could go on and on, and even extend into his more mature years, but what is the point of dwelling on them, other than to define a life of personal independence and defiance of much of culture’s nonsense.
Happy birthday, Mike, and the “old man” passes along the universal verity that whatever gene pool you find yourself in, you gotta swim in it!
