Attribution: David Benbennick, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, welcomes the keeper and Phyllis back from their five-day runaway to the tiny central Wisconsin lake, and poses the question: If you do not have a job can you legitimately take a vacation?
So, it wasn’t a vacation, but rather a change in scenery and long periods of absolute quiet, violated on a number of occasions by military jets roaring unseen high overhead, and prompting the keeper to complain to visiting son Mike and friend Owen Warren, with the response from Owen that he was thinking of moving from his Waunakee area home, in part due to the horrendous noise of the cavorting jet fighters from Truax Field.
“It stops your life in its tracks,” Owen said. “It is awful!”
From their far west-side Vista West living quarters, the keeper and Phyllis are pretty much immune to the jet noise and have only to contend with the traffic on Gammon, the banging garbage truck, the construction clang and beep-beep-beep at the high school, the sirens of emergency vehicles and frequent car alarms.
These noises, of course, all need to be tolerated in contemporary living; as apparently, so does the “warriors” banging their jet spears together in a deafening cacophony that makes one think of moving their residence.
So the keeper is back on the “job,” with yet one more thing to be indignant about: imposing an intolerable circumstance on thousands of people by way of a decision made by the military-industrial complex!
Photo by Bill Stokes