Well, I don’t quite remember when he said it all began really. It was at least a couple of decades ago. I do know it was a time when the world was caught up in a lot of turmoil. Sort of like today, I suppose.
My so-called free weekend turned out to have bad weather, unreliable electric power and a TV antenna that fell off the roof one more time than we could jerry-rig it back up, so we just gave up and started drinking more beer and putting more logs on a pretty good fire.
Anyway, my buddy Carl started telling this story and, even though he swore he wasn’t the Carl actually in the story, today I’m not so certain. And for damn sure I couldn’t tell if these characters, Willie and T. P., and Mr. Big – or even David and Dewitt – were real or just in his mind. Hmmm. But I do know that it’s not so much a story of the earlier accident, or the kidnapping, or the Indian reservation. Or about those dumb-ass Gofers and Governor Dill, or even David’s disastrous Thanksgiving dinner. No, it pretty much transcends all of that, at least to me.
It’s really, well, a story about what happens when small courages combine with crazy events and some pretty interesting individuals are thrown together like a polyester suit in a hot clothes dryer along with a Stetson. You know there’s no way anything will fit anymore, and you’ll never wear the damn things, but it’s the wrinkles that make you look at everything more closely, shake your head, and in some way see the beauty of it all and admire it anyway.