Attribution: Ford Model T, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper is fresh off one of those high-tech car experiences that discourages him from so much as opening the hood as corporate decisions and sophisticated techies make a big deal out of a simple dead battery.
The keeper’s relationship with cars began modestly with the abandoned Model T Ford that the keeper coerced his father into using the horses to pull out from behind the neighbor’s machine shed in the middle of the winter to a home barnyard location where the keeper could crank at it all spring in the perverse and pathetic conviction that the engine would start because one cylinder fired once early in March.
The keeper’s younger brother Orville was also coerced—maybe bribed into being part of the endless cranking, his role being to sit shivering behind the wheel to advance the spark in the remote chance the engine might fire again.
Only those with Model T experience will recognize the situation, complete with the four different buzzes from the T’s four coils as the engine is cranked.
The keeper can hear it to this day and wagers that Orv can too. The keeper would ask him about it but he may still retain traces of
resentment from what was unquestionably older-brother abuse.
Photo by Bill Stokes