Attribution: bergsten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that the keeper is among those knife-carrying males who inherited the pocket-knife habit from his father when it was a societal-wide practice.
There existed among some of the working-class knife carriers a curious “game” whereby you could not deny another person’s request to trade pocketknives, which spawned the practice of carrying two knives, one your good knife and another rusty piece of junk as your trading knife. The keeper recalls the difficulty of grasping the entertainment value of this when it was first pointed out to him as a child.
The current adult world has established conditions to virtually eliminate pocket-knife carriers: the keeper has lost several knives to security confiscation at airports and at even at Miller Park where the obvious assumption had to be that there was risk of his Swiss Army knife’s corkscrew feature being used to open a bottle of Merlot, or maybe to spread mustard on a brat.
But he persists and a highlight of the keeper’s day might be when Phyllis requests that he get out his pocketknife to open a stubborn package, or to divide up a shared apple.
Anybody out there interested in trading pocketknives?
Photo by Bill Stokes