Attribution: Father of JGKlein, used with permission, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, joins the keeper in operating in that statistical area of life expectancy of men being less than for women, and also noting the risk involved in growing up with older male cousins and their friends.
The keeper does so by opening the memory bank to winter Sunday afternoons when older cousins used a long hay-rope to attach a steerable bobsled to a car whereupon they would speed up and down snow-choked country roads within inches of barbed wire fences and culvert depressions with a sled load of innocents like the keeper and his younger age group.
Using a second rope, one of those older participants would sometimes go solo on a pair of skis and the keeper has a wonderful vintage image of Vern speeding along on his skis in the ditch and a rooster pheasant exploding up out of the snow to hit Vern in the face and upend him in a spectacular rotating tangle of legs, skis, snow and tail feathers.
The keeper claims that when he can recall and laugh at that wonderful winter image after all these years–80 or so, then life has been good to him; and he should tell Phyllis about the pheasant incident, even though she has doubtless heard it before.
Photo by Bill Stokes