Kickass and Lifetime of Cars by Bill Stokes

Attribution: Patrick from Merrimack, NH, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes the keeper’s lifelong relationship with cars, beginning back when he talked his father into hooking up the horses and pulling home a Model T pickup that had been rusting away behind a neighbor’s shed.

His high school car was a ’32 Chevy that also came back to life from behind another neighbor’s barn. That vehicle had no upholstery or floor mats and one side of the front bumper frequently dropped down on the roadway making a horrible clattering sound that tended to frighten girl passengers. Also, the battery once fell off on a dark night going down the big hill into Rice Lake with a new potential girlfriend on board.

The keeper went through a long car restoration stage, obviously attempting to slow down the passage of time.

All this car preoccupation has been reduced down to an occasional car show where Phyllis gets out her camera and makes old models look new and ready for the road. The keeper asks that she do the same for him, and though he was born during the era of the Ford Model A, he presents the borrowed photo of a 1931 Chrysler to represent what he would like to consider himself looking like as a model from that same year.

Phyllis is a photo-artist: she can do it!