Attribution: © European Union, 2024, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, sympathizes with the keeper as he continues to fall even farther behind in trying to adjust to the ever-changing, all-American preoccupation with shopping.
The keeper’s resistance to shopping obviously has its origin in his very first solo experience when it took him two days to buy a tube of BBs at the old Farmer’s Store in Barron. It was prior to the family moving out onto the farm so the keeper would have been 7 or 8 years old, and as he stood as inconspicuously as possible in the hardware department, the bald-headed clerk obviously concluded that he was there waiting for his mother or just to watch those fascinating little carriers shoot back and forth on the overhead cashier system. In any case, the keeper stood his shopping ground all of one afternoon, his fifteen cents in hand and trying not to stare at the clerk, until the store closed at its usual 5 pm., and he had to leave and walk home.
It was late the next afternoon when the bald-headed clerk looked curiously, if not in some surprise, at the keeper as he stood back in his usual waiting place. “Are you lost, kid?” is how the keeper remembers the clerk’s acknowledgement of his presence.
Contact having finally been made, the BB deal was consummated and the keeper walked home to go sparrow hunting in the backyard.
But those two days required to buy a fifteen-cent tube of BBs left the kind of shopping mark on the keeper that explains why he prefers waiting in the car as Phyllis heads into the store with list in hand.
Photo by Bill Stokes