Different Slants

May 31,2007

One early morning in May 2007, I was standing in front of my bathroom mirror, bleary-eyed and sleepy. My creaking fifty-seven year-old spine takes a while to loosen its rigidity and I move slowly for the first hour or so after waking up.

So I’m standing there, my left hand filled with a small cloud of white shaving cream, trying to remember what to do next. Then I heard a sudden sound of loud, ferocious barking from my backyard. It was our family wolf pack, whose barks came in a variety of sizes: Rosie, a black Miniature Dachshund, Betsy the lovable Beagle and Jasmine, our Labrador/Spaniel with her piercing yellow/brown eyes.

High-pitched squeaks to deep rumbles. These were not friendly sounds crashing into my ears. All three dogs are hunters.

Then I heard Sarah’s scream. Sarah was ten, getting ready for school and she usually stood outside with my wife, Joy, in the morning, watching our three dogs race around the wide yard when they are first freed from the night’s confinement of our house. This wasn’t a normal morning, however.

I snapped out of my semi-conscious state and ran over to the second story bedroom window that looks down on our backyard. I saw Sarah standing there with this little white powder puff something cradled in both her hands, as she tearfully looked up at me. Whatever she was holding looked just like the small white swirl of shaving cream still in my left hand.

Then Joyce saw me and yelled,

“Bob! Get down here now! Hurry!!”

I wiped my hand off on a towel and raced down the stairs and outside, shoeless and shirtless. The spring air was cool on my bare skin. In a moment I saw the situation that caused the sequence of sounds I’d heard moments before.

Joy was restraining Betsy and Jasmine, tightly gripping their leather collars as they both tried to surge away from her. Mini-Rosie was crouching next to Joy’s feet, suspiciously yapping. Sarah was still holding the white something. Both mother and daughter motioned with their chins toward the chain-link fence that separates our house from our neighbors.

My eyes fixed on a small, sandy-colored, salt and peppery long-eared…rabbit…caught in one of the diamond-shaped openings in the metal fence. Its head, long ears and shoulders were on our neighbor’s side of the fence, while its big rear feet and muscular hind legs were still on our side. There was a tiny bit of bright red blood where its fluffy white tail used to be, before one of my dogs bit it off.

The dogs were hysterical and kept lunging toward the trapped rabbit. Joy was franticly trying to hold them back and Sarah was standing between Joy and the rabbit, still holding up the bitten-off snow white tail in her hands, like it was an offering to the gods. I was standing, shivering in the cool damp morning air, summoned by both of them to save the bunny.

I barked at Joy (like a fourth dog) to drag the two larger dogs into the house and then bring me a dry dish towel. I snapped at Sarah to drop the severed tail and go in the house and wash her hands. Then, turning to the trapped rabbit, I watched as it kicked its disproportionately large rear legs, still trying to squirm through the tiny opening in the metal fence. Its small black eyes looked terrified to me as it continued its futile efforts to escape from its trap.

Rosie had followed Joy into our house, like she was attached to my wife’s foot. Sarah remained rooted to the ground as she watched every movement of the dogs, the rabbit, her mother and me, as if she was filming this incident with her sea-green eyes for the evening news. She wasn’t going to miss this little drama for anything and I wasn’t going to disappoint her. It was time for me to free the rabbit.

Joy ran back out in a second with the dish towel I’d requested. I grabbed it from her and carefully placed it over the quivering hindquarters of the rabbit that were on my side of our fence. The rabbit wasn’t pleased by my preparations. It just kept kicking.

I placed my hands gently over the towel, feeling the soft warmth from the struggling little creature’s body flow through the thin cloth. Then, I remembered Thumper.

Thumper.

About twenty-five years earlier, in 1982, I was walking by a neighborhood pet shop and spied a tiny, adorable baby bunny with ridiculously long ears hanging down from her head, as it dragged them around the small window cage.

The wooden sign said:

Lop-Eared Rabbits For Sale

The little bunny looked so adorable to me that I just had to see it. Obviously, I was very young. And, very stupid.

I walked into the cramped pet store—cages and fish tanks everywhere, it seemed—asked the attractive girl working there if I could see the baby rabbit in the window. Knowing a sucker when she saw one, the girl plucked the furry little cutie out of its fragrant cage and placed its warm shivering body in my cupped hands. The bunny’s long, long ears hung down both sides of my hands, framing them. The cute clerk already knew she wouldn’t be putting that handful of a rabbit back into its window cage. She firmly closed the access door to the cage and hooked it shut.

About one hundred dollars later, I was back at my house with a large, collapsible metal cage, a heavy bulging bag of rabbit food pellets, a plastic bunny bowl, and one irresistibly cute female Lop-Eared Rabbit. The brief time setting up rabbit housekeeping in my kitchen…was the peak moment of our relationship. I named our new house pet Thumper, after young Bambi’s funny little forest friend in the famous animated Disney movie.

I soon learned that the hard black pellets a rabbit ate came out the other end looking exactly the same. Immediately I became suspicious and began to wonder if unscrupulous pet shops that sold rabbits gathered up the end product and re-sold it as “rabbit food.” Who could tell?

Then I discovered my new pet sat silently still, all day, every day, with only its little nose twitching. That adorable, long eared little cutie I held in my hands in the pet shop swiftly swelled to the size and weight of a bowling ball, and the long ears grew even longer. But now they looked more like a couple of downy daggers. Thumper was not exactly a riot of fun.

My earlier crop of children, Lisa, David and Rachel, then seven, four and two respectively, quickly grew bored with their silent, motionless gray fur ball of a pet, parked in our kitchen. There became a very quiet, mutual co-existence between Thumper and my family, with dark pellets going in, and dark pellets coming out. And that was it.  It was an early, and very disturbing, possible preview into the future of recycling.

One time, in an ill-fated effort to reconnect with the formerly sweet looking baby bunny I saw in the pet store window—after that seductress in the pet shop lulled me into bunny ownership—I opened up Thumper’s cage door, reached in to gently pull out my sullen pet, now the size of a meteorite and about as responsive, and lifted her up in front of me to look into her impenatrable dark eyes.

It was as if I’d bought a canary at that pet shop and was now holding up a surly, immobile, pint-sized T-Rex. Then suddenly, evidently returning my un-enchanted gaze, Thumper swiftly raised her massive and dangerous clawed back feet and began to rapidly and repeatedly scratch my bare chest with her long nails, like she was running a marathon across my body to escape from me. Her hard nails left a hash of bloody scratches on my chest, blood oozing from some of them. It was not a Kodak moment.

I was imagining getting ready for bed, taking off my t-shirt and having my wife Joyce notice the bloody gashes across my chest, with this very disturbed expression on her lovely face.

Then I was imaging trying to explain to her that the gashes were inflicted on me by an aggressive and passionate rabbit. 

 Oh, yeah, I’m sure that explanation would go over really big with my trusting wife…..wouldn’t it?

A few months later, around Christmas time, when we came home from the movies one night, I noticed that Thumper’s black pellets remained uneaten. This was highly unusual. I poked Thumper softly through her cage to get a reaction, but her round furry body was cold. Thumper had died. My hostile pet was gone the next morning and no one missed her. The rabbit-raising period of my life…was over.

All these uncharitable thoughts raced through my memories in just a few seconds as I tentatively held my fingers around the still here and now trapped rabbit’s delicate ribs. I would attempt to help free it, but I didn’t have to like it.

Holding it through the thin cloth, I tried to tug the bunny backwards, through the metal fence. But the small rabbit kicked hard, pulling itself even further into its trap. Wild rabbits weren’t too bright, I decided. I again pulled its body back toward me, holding its bones a bit firmer, the dish towel slipping on the rabbit’s silky fur as it continued its hopeless quest to escape from me. Maybe it thought I was another form of dog: Larger, with smaller teeth and somewhat less fur. Stupid rabbit!

The towel, meant to protect me from being possibly bitten by the miserable varmint, was still draped across the rabbit’s back like a saddle. Exasperated now, knowing Sarah had to leave for school and me for work at my store, I grasped the rabbit’s fragile body more firmly, less concerned about frightening it than freeing it and being done with the ungrateful creature.

With my strong fingers clutching its ribs for traction, I determined to pull it back to me. The rabbit kicked fiercely. I pulled. Inch by inch, more of its speckled brown fur was on my side of the fence. It was Mammal to Mammal now, the smaller tail-less one losing ground to the larger tail-less one. It was the unchangeable Law of the Suburbs. Sarah never moved, soaking in every second of the exasperating rescue, her anxious mouth trembling.

After several more seconds of my steadily taking more than giving in this inter-species tug-of-war, the rabbit must have seen the light. It hunched its petite shoulders closer together, flattened its long ears against its back at the same time and ceased struggling. First the rabbit’s small front paws, then its shoulders and finally, its tiny brainless head slid easily back through the cold metal fence.

Not willing to wait for any rabbit appreciation, remembering Thumper’s unpleasant reaction to my attempted affection a quarter-century before, the very moment the rabbit’s head cleared the fence I instantly released my grip and watched as the bunny with the bloody butt scampered away from me, escaping through a larger opening under the fence’s swinging gate.

I turned back to Sarah and yelled at her, again, to drop that rabbit’s bloody tail, still sheltered in her shivering cupped hands and told Joyce to wash Sarah’s hands thoroughly and also throw the dish towel in the garbage.

As I finished dressing and was about to turn to fetch Sarah and drive her to school, she suddenly raced into my room, threw her thin strong arms around my waist, hugging me tightly and said, with her face buried in my chest, her words partly muffled,

“Daddy, thanks for saving the bunny.”

I paused for a moment from all my busy hurrying and softly stroked her long dark blond hair…mammal to mammal. Her happiness filled the room. My annoyed impatience with trying to free the rabbit evaporated. I realized the interruption in my routine was worth it.

Sarah was worth it.

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                                      About the writer and his other life in Skokie, Illinois:

 Bob Katzman’s Magazine Museum: 100,000 periodicals back to 1576!
Wall of Rock: 50 years of cool Rock periodicals on display & for sale
4906 Oakton St. (8000 north and 4900 west) Skokie, Ill 60077
(847)677-9444 Mon-Fri: 10 am to 5 pm / Weekends: 10 am to 2 pm

Katzman’s Publishing Company site: www.FightingWordsPubco.com
Katzman’s online non-fiction stories: www.DifferentSlants.com

Poetry? For me, writing poetry is not an option.
It’s a response to emotion. Like cigarette smoke,
it’s fast-flowing, shapeless and with little time to capture it.
Writing poetry is an imperative. I say what I feel compelled to say.

I sell my five published books via mail order and accept major credit cards.
I don’t use PayPal. I just talk to people on the phone.
Fast, reliable service. Read my stories and see what you think.
I’m also available for hire to read my true Chicago stories to organizations
and answer all questions. I autograph my books when I sell them.

I am currently seeking an agent to do more readings.
Feel free to call me at the number above.