Kickass Has Battery Woes by Bill Stokes

Attribution: New York Public Library, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, notes that the keeper has lived with car battery woes his entire long life and it isn’t over yet—the battery woes, that is, as a Subaru battery warranty issue involves a loaner car and an indefinite wait as “the warehouse is out of the appropriate replacement item.”

As with many issues that have been incredibly complicated by technology—replace the damn battery and go, the keeper recalls a much earlier in life battery issue: As reluctantly innocent teens, the keeper and his faithful coconspirator cousin Rob were patrolling Barron Country Communities one night in a futile search for interesting girls. Having struck out in Barron and Cameron they were on their way to Rice Lake which was a bigger town with more girls. They were traveling—speeding? down the big hill south of Rice Lake on Highway 53 in the keeper’s 1932 Chevrolet when the rusted-out battery case under the floorboards gave it up and the battery fell out onto the road, plunging everything—especially the keeper and Rob into total high-speed darkness.

Surviving teen car years can be full of surprises but the night the battery fell out, ranks up there with another night when so-called friends criss-crossed the old Chevy’s sparkplug wires and the unknowing keeper drove home with a back-firing engine sounding like an attacking army and attracting the attention of “Dishy” the local cop.