Living Like a Rabbit

          

      This morning, being Saturday, we were a little late letting Mr Beezhold, the rabbit, out of the hutch. “Did he hop out?”  I asked when Mark came back in. “No,” he shook his head, “he just chomped on that old cabbage stump he’s been ignoring for a week. Pouting.”  What if we all took lessons for how to live from a backyard rabbit?

1.       Insist upon your rituals. You must be let out by 7:15 AM. If you are not, pout while everyone is watching, then slip out to eat something they would rather you left alone.

2.       Demand nose rubs. Especially when someone is trying to haul the bike cart out and keep you from escaping the back yard. Wrinkle up your nose and look at them beseechingly.

3.       Try all possible foods. Just a nibble. Even rhubarb. You just might like it.

4.       Be comfortable. Dig down to cool earth in the summer. Burrow in straw in the winter. In the between time, know where the sun lands all day long and move accordingly.

5.       Survey your kingdom from High Places.

6.       Celebrate life. There’s nothing quite like a quick dash across the yard, with a twist and toss of the body into the air to express your inner joy.

Passing of David Crosby

 

Crosby, Stills and Nash were the soundtrack of my 20s.

                My first car was a four door yellow Rabbit from 1979, with an automatic transmission. It was a great little car. My friend Brian showed me how to work on the brakes, Gordon taught me how to tune an engine, and I did regular work on the engine. My biggest success was a series of switches that controlled the temperature of the engine, turning the cooling fan on. I spent a lot of time in auto parts stores and at the front desk of my mechanic, asking questions.

                My wardrobe for this work was a Crosby, Stills, and Nash t-shirt from the Daybreak Again tour. It was faded and had a couple of battery acid holes in the front. Perfect to rummage around an engine in. I would walk into the auto parts store with a question, wearing my shirt. The guy at the front counter would smile—cute little girl coming in with a dumb question. But, when I got to the front, inevitably, he would say “That was a great concert. I saw them in Portland.” “I did, too. It was great.” And there would be this moment when we would both remember those voices, braiding together on an old familiar tune, on a warm August night in Portland Maine.  A long pause that brought us together, made us equals. Then, he would smile again and ask “What do you need?” I would explain, consult, listen closely, and head back out, full of serious information.

                I am sad that I will never hear those three voices braiding together, live, again.  

The Biggest Mess

 

                I knocked over half a quart of deep yellow paint this morning. It was a moderate mess—the paint was thick and I had just washed the floor, so I was able to scoop quite a bit back into the can before washing it all up. There have been worse messes—the day the coffee pot exploded all over the kitchen; the dropped half gallon of salad dressing in the walk in fridge at the grocery store where I worked after college; the quart of primer that exploded all over my bookshelves, leaving my books still marked 30 years later. But the biggest mess I have ever seen was the cauliflower cheese soup at Ceres on winter afternoon.

                I was carrying a 2 gallon metal insert of just heated soup over to the steam table. It was the middle of lunch. The counter was packed. There was bread all neatly packed for delivery under the racks. People were hungry; they liked the soup; they wanted more.  I slipped. The soup went up into the air and came down…everywhere. It was all over the floor. It went up the walls and the glass of the big fridge. It splashed onto the phone. It covered the neatly packed bread. It dribbled onto the counter. The floor became a skating rink in the middle of the lunch rush. I grabbed the dustpan to begin to scoop up soup, slipped, and the dustpan flew over the counter and landed in…someone’s soup. She was not amused; it took all of Chris The Boy’s considerable charms to settle her down with a new bowl, extra bread, and desert. The chaos was worse than the day a mouse decided to visit the front of the store and Jeffery announced its existence, loudly, to one and all.  

                We did get it cleaned up and the bread went out on schedule. But cauliflower cheese soup, because of its texture, its scent, and its slightly oily constancy, created the biggest mess I have ever seen.

                What was yours?