Attribution: Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, loafed with the keeper and Phyllis in front of the wide-open door as the waning daylight lost its sun-stored warmth and its luminating powers.
Somewhere out there, invisible in the evolving late October night, a lighted playground full of children produced a joyous non-stop shouting that came drifting in out of the darkness and in through the open door like the finest memory wine.
In the playground chorus were the voices of countless little friends from years ago when an unseasonably warm pre-Halloween night would have made it mandatory to be in the middle of the cacophony of youthful exuberance. The keeper wallowed in the memories and then he shut the door–the children’s shouting had stopped some time ago, and he and Phyllis went to bed.
The keeper had no dreams about being a kid on a playground, and he woke up in the very early morning to the beeping and clanging of the garbage truck out in the parking lot.
To borrow Walter Cronkite’s old sign-off: “And that’s the way it is!”
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