This did not involve just any old log: it was three huge sections from one of the original giant white pines. The tree had obviously been downed with lumber harvest in mind and then something went awry with those plans and the three huge logs began to age like the skeletons of history. They lay covered with deep moss and fungi in a pasture along the route to the country school and it was a ritualistic detour for the keeper to leave the road, climb up onto the first log section and walk the length of all three before rejoining his impatient sister back on the road.

It didn’t dawn on the keeper until much later when he learned of the dramatic history of the great Wisconsin pine trees that he had been treading on one of the spectacular era corpses as part of his walk to school.

Later, as his country school days ended, the keeper learned that a neighbor who owned a sawmill had harvested the big old logs and found the resulting lumber to be “Sound and beautiful!” in his words.

As the keeper tells the story to Phyllis, he will try, perhaps in vain, to control his emotions and not get carried away over his memories of his walk-on-the-logs to school. Phyllis will understand and maybe volunteer her experience of getting to school from the Canadian lumber camp.

Compared to some of the disastrous acts of the Capital gang-that- can’t-shoot-straight--those acts involving death and destruction for millions and a world on the edge of oblivion, perhaps cutting down some trees is not worthy of major indignation.

But the keeper once authored a book entitled “TREESON, An Apologia to Trees,” specifically those trees used to make the paper that carried his 35 years of newspaper rambling. He and Phyllis find the company of trees special in many ways, and the image of those cherry tree stumps moves them to yet another marker of the prevailing White House cruel insanity.

It began as Phyllis was pivoting with a handful of books, whereupon she executed a partial reverse rotation, stepped off-balance past the coffee table and then dove headfirst through the narrow opening between the keeper’s recliner and the couch to land face down, smashing a Kleenex box and ending up in that area of the carpeting most often needing crumb pickup from the keeper’s casual snacking.

While Phyllis’s performance might have been labeled as a common in-house “fall” such things are not permitted in the age group where she and the keeper reside. In fact, the fear of falling and the complications it can lead to is an unpleasant constant for the keeper and Phyllis’s crowd and so falls are not permitted.

Phyllis, who was once into square dancing, may find that experience useful as she gets her balance and acrobatic school up and--not running but walking, with the aid of balance devices like walkers and canes.

The morning-after finds Phyllis with only a slightly bruise

d elbow and otherwise unaffected by her “performance.” The keeper meanwhile is curious about “Do-si-do,” which calls for partnership participation in a prescribed move.

This news was received with indifference, even some enthusiasm in the campus area with its preponderance of young, supple bodies. But as the false information made its way out into the business community and then the residential areas the idea of an image of your body as part of an official inventory became increasingly unacceptable to an overweight and sagging citizenry.

Then when the retirement community heard that images of their aging bodies would be part of official records there was a virtual uproar complete with protesters marching on suburban streets dressed in teepee and pup tent type clothing and carrying signs that said, “TIME DOES THIS TO ALL BODIES!”

It now appears that the Madison body camera misunderstanding may be cleared up as city officials take another run at the issue. At least that is what the keeper is telling Phyllis, based on information he overheard in the Vista West elevator on his way down to the exercise room.

The occasion, at Joel’s beautiful place on Lake Mendota, quickly made the point that nothing stays the same, certainly not the keeper’s old Friday lunch group when the likes of reporters Harvey Bruescher and Neal Shivley and Sam and Cliff and Frank, and such political heavyweights as Earl and Krause and Hassett and other notables were regulars at the Friday Portabella gatherings. They are all gone, along with many others, and those who remain like Scott and Harry and Hal and Eunice and Tom have all aged like good old pets.

The group of has-beens now displays a much healthier gender ratio with women speaking up on the usual politics of the day with obvious left leanings.

Another striking difference between the old and the current has-been assembly is the absence of reporters at the recent gathering:

the keeper was the only one there with a traditional media connection and his is, of course, frayed onto being useless.

“Where have all the reporters gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the reporters gone?

Long time ago…….”

The keeper qualifies as a has-been by many measurements and informs Phyllis that he has become as rare as a Hawaiian goose and expects special treatment.

Thank you to Ken and Joel and all the has-beens for a great lunch

!

The house on the hill was built in 2001 as an exercise in grief recovery, survived some of the keeper’s misguided personal antics and came to be an inspiring location as the keeper and Phyllis proved that there is no age limit on the profound benefits of love.

When it became obvious that maintenance issues were beyond the keeper’s aging capacities, the house on the hill was passed off to family members through son Rick’s foresight and ended up as the place where Andy and Ari’s family would live their love-nest lives.

The Sturgeon Moon knows a good thing when it sees it and even did a showy eclipse in a swing past Madison’s Vista West where the keeper and Phyllis gave it a welcome wave.

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Many Canadian trees are cut down to make the toilet paper that is shipped across the border to the US, which uses more toilet paper than any other country in the world--141 rolls annually per resident.

Germany is second at 134.

With the brainless scarecrow in the White House using his terrible tariff toys to interfere with the tissue issue, the international tissue market has, well, gone down the toilet along with any hope of meaningful economic relief from the narcissistic POTUS.

In earlier research, the keeper learned that as wood pulp was first

being identified as the raw material for toilet paper, some of the very first advertising made the point of “No Slivers!”

There simply has to be a way to get some antique toilet paper with slivers delivered to the White House. The Smithsonian could probably get it done. Canadian born Phyllis says Canada would help with that.

An underlying point of the keeper’s recent novel “Ah, the Women!” is that women must assume control of the world to save it from the disastrous libido-driven machinations of men. There can be no better support for that verity than the cultural contrast now in the news of a woman’s limitless capacity for good sense and doing good as opposed to the libido-for-brains male narcissistic cruelty emanating from the White House.

Ah, the Women! is available from Amazon and from the keeper at billstokesauthor.com; $16.95 plus postage.

In explaining “AS” to Phyllis, the keeper stressed that while everyone gets boundless opportunities to do stupid things, they do not always do them to achieve maximum disastrous results. There are many instances of people actually doing stupid things that, had AS been consulted, could have resulted in much more impressive calamitous outcomes. An example might be with AS making sure that when dad stupidly backs over the picnic basket it is on the way to the park when the basket is full of food and drink and not on the way home when it is empty.

The keeper would make the point with potential AS investors that there is much more stupidity than intelligence out there and Authentic Stupidity Parks will make the controversial AI data centers look like roadside outhouses by compression. The AS parks will be constructed to look like pine groves with hiking trails.

When he becomes an AS trillionaire, thew keeper plans to have a retractable roof built over all of Colorado so he can go trout fishing in the rain and not get wet. He also plans to get Jesus on the phone and ask Him just what the hell is the meaning of the gold etching on the Pearly Gates?

(Phyllis is already in contact with appropriate help as the keeper’s world and condition become ever more DIPUTS!)

Kickass warns the keeper and Phyllis about going on about their business as if they were not living like incarcerated strays in a national “shelter” being run by a demented King Midas. Their seeming indifference may mark them as being too out of it to join in the daily mass howling about the King Midas MAGA shelter mismanagement.

So, if Kickass and the keeper communicate about family issues or natural events, they run the risk of being identified as not caring that the MAGA-run shelter they occupy is on fire and the only available fire retardant is from the MAGA leaders’ chronic incontinence.

Life must go on until it doesn’t and that is entirely possible with mad King Midas on his golden throne, waving a loaded gun and talking insane trash to longtime US friends and allies.

When the keeper posts unrelated information he is not unaware of the brutally stupid MAGA reality, and he asks that he be thought of as an egg hurtling toward the Earth, under the false impression that he is flying while assuming that since he is “hard-boiled” he will survive the landing and have a big helping of Phyllis’s potato salad.

Kickass responders speculated that the reason the heart and lungs had been removed was to prevent the identification of bullet fragments, and there was also the suggestion that the odd circumstance smacked of the work of Secretary of Health RFK jr., given his off-the-wall history with wild species.

Meanwhile on the subject of human’s relating to other species, the Public TV channel aired a show about how one caring young man used his family feelings to demonstrate the reasons for saving the declining Ocelots in Texas.

Earlier, the keeper read a lengthy account of how the Bureau of Land Management program regarding wild mustangs is being manipulated to turn would-be adoptions into profitable routes to horse slaughterhouses. There are an estimated 73,000 wild horses in the US with the BLM goal to reduce that by 20,000 this year. As it now stands most of that reduction will be made in Canadian slaughterhouses, since horse slaughter is illegal in the US.

Among the many professionally done photos of Phyllis’s that the keeper admires his favorite is of a band of wild horses in Teddy Roosevelt National Park. It makes the point that while it is not always possible from a practical standpoint, the best way to share space with another species is to take its picture and hang it on the wall where you can see it wonder how that other species is doing

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The big cat was an adult male wearing a Michigan tracking collar from two years ago, and its movement had also been recorded on a number of trail cameras.

A necropsy by DNR scientists could detect no definite cause of death and it was obvious from its position on the railroad tracks that the cougar had been dead when placed there. To add to the mystery, the cougar’s heart and lungs were missing.

The incident makes the keeper yearn for his long ago “outdoor writer” days when he could have haunted the Friendship area until more of the odd story emerged.

Once in that general vicinity the keeper did a story about an abandoned private zoo and its cages full of animal skeletons. A Madison physician was involved as the zoo owner and the story did not end well as only wild pigs had survived by getting loose and eating the remains of other victims.

There is obviously no limit to the bizarre ways that humans relate to the other species on the planet. How far is it, for example, from poop-bags for the descendants of wolves as they tug at their leashes, to a cougar cut in half on the railroad tracks?

The keeper’s history with Norske Nook goes back to his Chicago Tribune days when there was only the original Osseo store just beginning to attain widespread pie fame. Somehow word got out at the Tribune that the keeper was going to do a story about the small-town pie sensation, and at least a half dozen fellow Tribune staffers demanded that the keeper bring them a Norske Nook pie, which he did. There was a significant deposit required on the pie tins, and to this day the keeper remembers that his pie patrol was pretty much a losing proposition for him.

But all in the name of pie as a personal treat, and a token of enjoyable sharing among friends: blueberry for the keeper and sour cream raisin for Phyllis.

Is there any way a “Pie Department” could be created to improve on the current government chaos? Not likely under the existing MAGA “bakers.” Maybe after the midterms when the Dems are in the pie baking kitchens

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The scissors sharpener came ambling down the country road with his little bundle of worldly goods and a blank expression behind his bristly beard. It was the shank of the Great Depression recovery years and wandering solitary men were not uncommon even on rural landscapes

The scissors sharpener was welcomed onto the back porch where Dad and Louie the hired man were taking the Sunday morning sunshine in uncharacteristic leisure with a dog named Shep and me as a curious kid.

Mom’s “good” scissors were suddenly in the scissor sharpener’s wrinkled hands and he showed Dad and Louie how to hold scissors so they either cut or didn’t cut no matter how sharp or dull they were. Dad and Louie grinned and nodded and it seemed to me that the scissor sharpener had just given away what must have been his most effective sales gimmick.

Mom brought the scissor sharpener a big sandwich--fried steak on home-made bread, and all those on the porch, especially Shep, watched the scissors sharpener slowly eat it.

When he had finished, he picked up his few simple tools and his sack of meager possessions and headed off down the road. But first he stood for a long time at the end of the driveway looking back at us on the porch.

That’s how I remember him best. And then, of course, he comes fleetingly to mind every time I pick up a pair of scissors and check to make sure I am holding them according to the scissors sharpener’s “cut” directions!

Personal memory failings were reviewed with head-nodding acknowledgement and the talk turned to absent elderly family members and acquaintances who are on the big “down” dementia escalator.

These conversations unfailingly go to site examples of uncharacteristic behavior in a loved one, and then there are pauses to consider the likelihood of such a thing happening to you, turning your inevitable departure into a long session of inconvenient absurdity.

Dementia in its official wrap of Alzheimer’s has become the epidemic of a culture that now commonly lives long enough to get it.

So, the afternoon visit moved on, not to politics with its mine-field risks, but to the weather where there was blanket agreement that we didn’t need any more of those scorching hot days of several weeks ago. We can remember them.

Damn, we can remember scorching hot days from 75 years ago!

Take that, dementia!

Most striking to the keeper was the action of Bonnie and Jack Lawton in making sure their long-held family property on the upper Wolf River will forever be open to the public.

This is not just “a piece of property”: it is a long stretch of the most unique and beautiful river in Wisconsin. It includes Big and Little Slough Gundy Rapids, a fascinating Native American and settlement history and it is where, if the keeper has a soul, it will be ensconced there in due time. In some respects, it is already there.

Jack’s father John introduced the keeper to the Wolf more than 60 years ago and it became much more than just a place for memorable weekend fishing. Consorting with the river was a spiritual thing, an experience of wallowing in a hallowed Natural Living Room, and to fill the Keepers’ mind with its existence even when he couldn’t get there.

Much appreciation is due to the DNR Board and Jack and Bonnie for this “good” thing they have done on the public’s behalf.

The keeper and Phyllis thank you, as do all of the future tadpoles, pollywogs and minnows who become members of their respective clans

.

As a result, the keeper and Phyllis have adapted a “no travel” plan which is primarily a list of destinations they will not be driving to, like noisy restaurants and sprawling supermarkets where there is the risk of the keeper losing Phyllis in “Produce” and not finding her until the checkout line. The “order and deliver” services become more and more appealing as the gas price soars.

In the meantime, the keeper and Phyllis will not be out on the road for anything but medical appointments or a possible keeper medicinal brandy crisis.

With Lindell fresh from his defeat as a candidate for Minnesota governor, and Johnson cheerleading the MAGA demolition derby, the time seems right to consider the benefits of a trade. Possibly, Lindell could donate a pillowcase for Tiffiny to use to carry some of his big load of Trump garbage.

It is this compulsion to be helpful that may be part of why Phyllis tolerates the keeper, even as he becomes increasingly dependent on her helpfulness, especially in tech matters. She may want to modify the keeper’s trade to include more of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation going to Minnesota: in addition to Tiffany, Vos and Grothman come to mind.

History shows that this was not always the case: from settlement days, a “dog catcher” was a common elective position in many communities, its function expanding to include other at-large problem animals.

Never, however, has there ever been mention of electing a “cat catcher,” a position that makes some sense since roaming cats kill an estimated 1.3 to 4 billion wild birds every year.

The keeper once did a cover story for the Tribune Sunday Magazine about cats and included facts about the bird damage they do.

Cat people readers suggested he leave town after describing their beloved pets as “roaming killers.”

The keeper struggles now to compare the problem cats with some of the yahoos who were on the ballots yesterday. Those wearing the “I’m this dumb” MAGA hats cannot be allowed to run at large. The keeper and Phyllis will be voting to elect a cat-catcher with a net big enough to capture the narcissistic Republicans before they kill off such common human “birds” as decency and compassion!

The keeper stumbled across the Allstar game video some years ago, and was blown away by it as it recalled that magic baseball day in 1953 when the keeper and his Army buddy, ticketless outside Crosley Field, were invited to join a Movie News film crew as it recorded the all-stars in their pre-game rituals on Crosley Field. Among those rituals was signing autographs and as the keeper sought Satchel’s signature, a photographer shouted, “One more, Satch,” and as a result the keeper ended up with a game program signed twice by “Satch” and by a dozen or so other big timers.

As a sham Movie News crew member, carrying a camera lens case, the keeper went with his crew up into the stands for a brief encounter with Ted Williams who, like the keeper, was recently returned from Korean war combat action. Ted asked the keeper if he had a mortar in the camera case and a very brief conversation about Korea ensued.

After the pre-game warmup activity, the crew chief led the way up onto the roof of Crosley Field to film and watch the game. “There aren’t any railings up here so don’t chase fly balls,” he warned.

Satch pitched briefly in the late innings, and the batters hit his stylized slow pitches until he left the mound to loud cheering.

It was one heckuva day, and the keeper would like to thank Ted Lasso for the reminder as to just how rare and wonderful it had been. Assuming there is a show-business budget to pay those appearing on the show, the keeper would request that Ted Lasso use his remuneration as a donation to the Black Players Baseball Alliance.

The keeper told Phylis that his one-second “stardom” on the biggest TV show currently running was not likely to change anything in their relationship. Phyllis nodded and went back to slicing the lasagna.

(to see the 1953 video search MLB 1953 All-Star Game

)