__________________________________
Bunnies: A Personal Retrospective
By Stephanie Kemp
Bunnies: A Personal Retrospective
By Stephanie Kemp
Show a five year old a baby bunny and she’ll want it.
Need it.
Try to steal it.
Show the same five year old the same bunny a few months later and she’ll be grateful for her new kitten.
The thing with bunnies is that they are both total liars in their promise of impossible adorability and totally human in what happens to their adorableness as they grow up.
The bunny in this example (“Bailey”) was brought to my kindergarten class by some sort of Suburban Detroit Bunny Farmer, who told us that she was the luckiest person on the planet because she got to raise so many of these adorable bunnies into full grown rabbits. (This was the only reason I thought about stealing it, because she had so many other bunnies. I could never steal a baby bunny from someone who might miss it. How would that person ever recover from such a loss?)
But I was deterred from my potential theft by what the bunny farmer said about the full grown rabbits: “Even when they are older and not as cute and they poop little pellets everywhere and sometimes bite you, a rabbit can be a great companion. Especially when you live alone on a farm!” (Actually, I might have made up that last part, but it is what I came to believe about the bunny farmer, because she seemed to be so much more at ease with the bunny than the people. I didn’t yet realize that there was a dividing line between five year olds and real people - maybe she just didn’t like us.)
So the bunny farmer and Bailey left and I went back to life with my kitten. I didn’t think about bunnies again for several years, until the worst thing happened.
My best friend and next door neighbor, Brooke, was moving to California with her family and without me.
This was extra terrible because I had just won her best friendship from my older sister, Tracy (Brooke was right between us in age. My younger sister, Ginny, didn’t stand a chance, but Brooke did have a little brother that Ginny had recently divorced our other neighbor for. While she, too, was devastated about the impending West Coast move, she had already reached out to her former husband to see about a reconciliation.)
All my mom would tell me about the new family was, “They are very nice. You will like them when you get to know them. And you will be nice to Julie.”
Uh oh. What was wrong with Julie? Am I going to be stuck with her? Is she (only) my age? Will this nice family still let us swim in their pool anytime we want, even if they are not home or it is the middle of the night?
“You already know her. From the club. Julie who beat you in the breaststroke last weekend. They are moving in on Friday and we are making them cookies.”
JULIE?!
I hated Julie. From the moment I first laid goggled eyes on her, I couldn’t stand her — and not just because she was a year younger than me and a much better swimmer, but because she was from a whole different planet:
She had brown eyes the size of pancakes that blinked in slow motion.
She had flat feet that propelled her across water like an alien speed boat.
She had a mom who only had one mode: Warm and Always Calm, no matter what.
She had a dad who looked like a streched Pa Walton and an always visiting uncle with a top secret job in Oregon working on something called a “Running Shoe.”
She had a perfectly backlit high school sister and a nice little brother with good posture and hands chronically in his pockets, man-style.
And none of them fought, ever.
I knew all of this because I was actually a Golf Club (this meant Swim Club to me) Spy and an expert on human behavior. When you are a terrible swimmer and forced to be on the swim team, you quickly learn that you will need to develop other skill sets if you are going to have a good life. I felt lucky to have been such a terrible swimmer. Not only because I found my calling early, but also because Coach Tim loved me and let me swim one length at a time and then walk back to the shallow end, never making me swim an actual lap. (This infuriated Tracy, who had to swim real laps, but I didn’t care. She hadn’t almost drowned in the lake or the abandoned pool at Grandpa’s, plus she wasn’t going to marry Tim, I was. Ginny didn’t care about any of this because she was too young to be on the swim team and just got to sit on Mom’s lap eating ice cream sandwiches all day.)
As if my mom could read my hateful mind, she added this to soften the blow:
“Julie has a bunny.”
While this was at least a promising addition to the dire neighborhood scenario, I knew I would need more information, starting with:
How old is this bunny?
_______________________
And now for some good news:
“Bugs” was still a baby, and totally adorable.
Julie let me hold him as often as I wanted, which was every day, all the time.
Her mom made really good coffee cake, and not just for breakfast.
Her dad answered all my questions about how to grill meats.
Her uncle made me think running for fun might actually be a great idea.
Her perfect sister respected me enough to ask my opinion of Jimmy Carter for her journalism class.
Her nice brother shared his candy without me having to use force, like I had to use with Brooke’s little brother.
Ginny’s former husband took her back.
We still got to swim all the time (but not alone or at night).
I had learned so much from living next door to Julie’s family that I was rethinking my life as a spy. I was learning things about human nature that made me think I might want to be more helpful, like maybe become a journalist or the President.
I realized that I liked Julie even though she was a better swimmer than me, because I also realized that she was nicer than me.
Things were going very well in the neighborhood.
_________________
But then the worst thing(s) happened. Julie’s dad and uncle were re-tarring the driveway and I was trying to help them. (Well, I didn’t really want to help, but I did have some questions about hamburgers and running. Plus Julie’s uncle was very handsome and Tim had quit being our coach to go work at a college in Ohio.)
Just as I was pretending to care about how they made the tar look so smooth, Tracy came out of the house and saw that I was wearing the shorts she wanted to wear on a bike ride to meet her friends. She told me to take them off but I ignored her because she always took my stuff without asking and because they looked really good on me, now that I was about to be a runner. We got into (a little bit of) a fight and she pushed me, accidentally (so she said) into the pot of tar, with my butt and her shorts stuck in the black goo while my arms and legs flailed around trying unsuccessfully to get me out.
And the thing about tar besides that you don’t want to get stuck in it, is that it is hot.
HOT.
And stinky.
STINKY.
And sticky.
STICKY.
I was trying not to cry as Tracy was trying to pull me out, saying sorry over and over again. Julie’s dad and uncle ran over from the back of the house and pulled me out while Tracy went to get our mom.
Once freed from the vat, I knew I would never:
Recover.
Swim or Run again.
Eat another piece of coffee cake or fully enjoy a cheeseburger.
Forget this humiliation.
I knew I would never have a worse day on Planet Earth.
Until the next day……
_____________________
I was sitting by myself in our front yard rock garden, pretending to pull weeds so I would get my allowance. I was also sitting on a towel because my butt was still sore from the day I knew I would need to block out forever if I was to survive.
All of a sudden Julie ran out of her screen door, crying. She came over to me sobbing that Bugs was gone and she couldn’t find him anywhere. Her sadness (now that I liked her so much) broke my heart and I forgot all about my horrifying incident and embarrassment over something so meaningless as stolen shorts and getting stuck in tar. Julie needed me, and I was the perfect person to help her, given my understanding of bunnies, spy work, human behavior (which I could clearly apply to a runaway rabbit) and human nature (Julie just needed to take a few deep breaths and would feel better after we made a plan of action - everything feels worse when you don’t have a plan).
We will find him!
He is going to be fine!
Everyone needs a break sometimes!
He LOVES you!
He would never leave!
But just as Julie was catching her breath, I noticed something between the rocks, nestled in the weeds I hadn’t pulled. It was a head. A bunny head. A still young enough to be adorable Bunny Head.
I needed to get Julie out of there. And I needed to do this fast, while I was still breathing and not fully understanding what I was actually seeing. Maybe it wasn’t Bugs. Maybe it was a squirrel. Maybe Tracy was just getting even with me, but she would never do that to someone who wasn’t her sister (or to a tiny bunny). I needed to buy time. If I could keep this from Julie for a few months, when Bugs would no longer be so tiny and adorable, but more like the bunnies that grow up to poop pellets and bite you, she wouldn’t be so sad. I just needed time!
As I started to lead Julie away to get cookies from our kitchen, we saw my no longer a kitten holding the lower half of a bunny body in her mouth. She dropped it right in front of my feet, full of love and pride, trophy style, in the tough as nails and I don’t give a shit way that only a cat knows how to be.
Julie screamed and ran home.
We had run out out of time.
Julie and I were never the same again, even though she was still nice to me, probably because her parents were so nice and she was so well raised.
My parents were nice too, as evidenced by the fact that they let me quit the swim team.
___________________
Now, you might think that is enough about bunnies (in fact, I bet you do), but there is one more story I need to tell, to round out my fucked up bunny trifecta.
___________________
There was a man.
And a mansion.
And a magazine with “really good articles.”
And they were turning really pretty women into bunnies.
Only pretty women, and only bunnies in the sense that they had to wear fake rabbit ears on their heads and cotton tails on their butts, stuck on over tiny bathing suits and nylons...Oh, and bow ties!
What.
Is.
Happening?
I had so many questions about these bunnies that I didn’t know where to begin, or who to ask. When I first found out about the bunnies (in the bathroom at my friend’s house, thanks to the startling magazine stash under the toilet with all of those good articles), I was sure I was onto something important. Something that would be all over the big news with Walter Cronkite, not just the little news with Bill Bonds, once I had reported it. And while I did feel bad about my my friend’s dad who had always been so nice to me but who would now obviously have to go to jail, I felt better when I remembered that her mom also had a fancy job in a business office. My friend’s family would be ok. (I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s life — I only wanted to make things right.)
But when I started doing my spy work, I realized that everyone already knew about these women bunnies. There was a whole world of them and that world was getting bigger every second. My dad told me about the mansion in Hollywood and my mom said that boys will be boys and that women were free to do whatever they wanted. They both told me that the women made a good living and got to travel a lot.
As I was trying to get my brain around all of this, I learned more about the man behind this bunny business. He was old but the bunnies were young. He was sort of handsome in a grandpa way but only ever wore silk robes and captain’s hats. His office was a spinning bed and he always smoked a pipe while working. I was looking for something to put him in jail for, but then I learned that his girlfriend, “Barbi," was the lady I loved from Hee Haw and the Love Boat. I had wanted to be her because she was so pretty (even with her brown hair) and because she had such a nice singing voice. They looked really happy in the pictures, and I never saw her in a bunny costume, although I did see her (almost) naked on the cover of the magazine the next time I had to pee at my friend’s house.
The bunnies looked happy. Movie stars went to the mansion. Jimmy Carter did an interview for the magazine. I had recently learned in school that sometimes you need a Revolution to make things right, even though I didn’t understand exactly (or at all) what this Bunny Revolution was about.
This would be the third strike for my relationship with bunnies, even though I could tell one more story about the time I grew up and my husband and I got a baby dwarf bunny named Pete for our daughters as a surprise, but then he died the next morning from diarrhea.
I will spare you that one, as I think it is pretty clear that I might have some more internal spy work to do on my own thoughts and feelings about bunnies.
At least I still like swimming and neighbors.
And cats…at any age.
(But never running and only the occasional cheeseburger….with a nice glass of bordeaux rouge or a cold beer in a bottle.)
Need it.
Try to steal it.
Show the same five year old the same bunny a few months later and she’ll be grateful for her new kitten.
The thing with bunnies is that they are both total liars in their promise of impossible adorability and totally human in what happens to their adorableness as they grow up.
The bunny in this example (“Bailey”) was brought to my kindergarten class by some sort of Suburban Detroit Bunny Farmer, who told us that she was the luckiest person on the planet because she got to raise so many of these adorable bunnies into full grown rabbits. (This was the only reason I thought about stealing it, because she had so many other bunnies. I could never steal a baby bunny from someone who might miss it. How would that person ever recover from such a loss?)
But I was deterred from my potential theft by what the bunny farmer said about the full grown rabbits: “Even when they are older and not as cute and they poop little pellets everywhere and sometimes bite you, a rabbit can be a great companion. Especially when you live alone on a farm!” (Actually, I might have made up that last part, but it is what I came to believe about the bunny farmer, because she seemed to be so much more at ease with the bunny than the people. I didn’t yet realize that there was a dividing line between five year olds and real people - maybe she just didn’t like us.)
So the bunny farmer and Bailey left and I went back to life with my kitten. I didn’t think about bunnies again for several years, until the worst thing happened.
My best friend and next door neighbor, Brooke, was moving to California with her family and without me.
This was extra terrible because I had just won her best friendship from my older sister, Tracy (Brooke was right between us in age. My younger sister, Ginny, didn’t stand a chance, but Brooke did have a little brother that Ginny had recently divorced our other neighbor for. While she, too, was devastated about the impending West Coast move, she had already reached out to her former husband to see about a reconciliation.)
All my mom would tell me about the new family was, “They are very nice. You will like them when you get to know them. And you will be nice to Julie.”
Uh oh. What was wrong with Julie? Am I going to be stuck with her? Is she (only) my age? Will this nice family still let us swim in their pool anytime we want, even if they are not home or it is the middle of the night?
“You already know her. From the club. Julie who beat you in the breaststroke last weekend. They are moving in on Friday and we are making them cookies.”
JULIE?!
I hated Julie. From the moment I first laid goggled eyes on her, I couldn’t stand her — and not just because she was a year younger than me and a much better swimmer, but because she was from a whole different planet:
She had brown eyes the size of pancakes that blinked in slow motion.
She had flat feet that propelled her across water like an alien speed boat.
She had a mom who only had one mode: Warm and Always Calm, no matter what.
She had a dad who looked like a streched Pa Walton and an always visiting uncle with a top secret job in Oregon working on something called a “Running Shoe.”
She had a perfectly backlit high school sister and a nice little brother with good posture and hands chronically in his pockets, man-style.
And none of them fought, ever.
I knew all of this because I was actually a Golf Club (this meant Swim Club to me) Spy and an expert on human behavior. When you are a terrible swimmer and forced to be on the swim team, you quickly learn that you will need to develop other skill sets if you are going to have a good life. I felt lucky to have been such a terrible swimmer. Not only because I found my calling early, but also because Coach Tim loved me and let me swim one length at a time and then walk back to the shallow end, never making me swim an actual lap. (This infuriated Tracy, who had to swim real laps, but I didn’t care. She hadn’t almost drowned in the lake or the abandoned pool at Grandpa’s, plus she wasn’t going to marry Tim, I was. Ginny didn’t care about any of this because she was too young to be on the swim team and just got to sit on Mom’s lap eating ice cream sandwiches all day.)
As if my mom could read my hateful mind, she added this to soften the blow:
“Julie has a bunny.”
While this was at least a promising addition to the dire neighborhood scenario, I knew I would need more information, starting with:
How old is this bunny?
_______________________
And now for some good news:
“Bugs” was still a baby, and totally adorable.
Julie let me hold him as often as I wanted, which was every day, all the time.
Her mom made really good coffee cake, and not just for breakfast.
Her dad answered all my questions about how to grill meats.
Her uncle made me think running for fun might actually be a great idea.
Her perfect sister respected me enough to ask my opinion of Jimmy Carter for her journalism class.
Her nice brother shared his candy without me having to use force, like I had to use with Brooke’s little brother.
Ginny’s former husband took her back.
We still got to swim all the time (but not alone or at night).
I had learned so much from living next door to Julie’s family that I was rethinking my life as a spy. I was learning things about human nature that made me think I might want to be more helpful, like maybe become a journalist or the President.
I realized that I liked Julie even though she was a better swimmer than me, because I also realized that she was nicer than me.
Things were going very well in the neighborhood.
_________________
But then the worst thing(s) happened. Julie’s dad and uncle were re-tarring the driveway and I was trying to help them. (Well, I didn’t really want to help, but I did have some questions about hamburgers and running. Plus Julie’s uncle was very handsome and Tim had quit being our coach to go work at a college in Ohio.)
Just as I was pretending to care about how they made the tar look so smooth, Tracy came out of the house and saw that I was wearing the shorts she wanted to wear on a bike ride to meet her friends. She told me to take them off but I ignored her because she always took my stuff without asking and because they looked really good on me, now that I was about to be a runner. We got into (a little bit of) a fight and she pushed me, accidentally (so she said) into the pot of tar, with my butt and her shorts stuck in the black goo while my arms and legs flailed around trying unsuccessfully to get me out.
And the thing about tar besides that you don’t want to get stuck in it, is that it is hot.
HOT.
And stinky.
STINKY.
And sticky.
STICKY.
I was trying not to cry as Tracy was trying to pull me out, saying sorry over and over again. Julie’s dad and uncle ran over from the back of the house and pulled me out while Tracy went to get our mom.
Once freed from the vat, I knew I would never:
Recover.
Swim or Run again.
Eat another piece of coffee cake or fully enjoy a cheeseburger.
Forget this humiliation.
I knew I would never have a worse day on Planet Earth.
Until the next day……
_____________________
I was sitting by myself in our front yard rock garden, pretending to pull weeds so I would get my allowance. I was also sitting on a towel because my butt was still sore from the day I knew I would need to block out forever if I was to survive.
All of a sudden Julie ran out of her screen door, crying. She came over to me sobbing that Bugs was gone and she couldn’t find him anywhere. Her sadness (now that I liked her so much) broke my heart and I forgot all about my horrifying incident and embarrassment over something so meaningless as stolen shorts and getting stuck in tar. Julie needed me, and I was the perfect person to help her, given my understanding of bunnies, spy work, human behavior (which I could clearly apply to a runaway rabbit) and human nature (Julie just needed to take a few deep breaths and would feel better after we made a plan of action - everything feels worse when you don’t have a plan).
We will find him!
He is going to be fine!
Everyone needs a break sometimes!
He LOVES you!
He would never leave!
But just as Julie was catching her breath, I noticed something between the rocks, nestled in the weeds I hadn’t pulled. It was a head. A bunny head. A still young enough to be adorable Bunny Head.
I needed to get Julie out of there. And I needed to do this fast, while I was still breathing and not fully understanding what I was actually seeing. Maybe it wasn’t Bugs. Maybe it was a squirrel. Maybe Tracy was just getting even with me, but she would never do that to someone who wasn’t her sister (or to a tiny bunny). I needed to buy time. If I could keep this from Julie for a few months, when Bugs would no longer be so tiny and adorable, but more like the bunnies that grow up to poop pellets and bite you, she wouldn’t be so sad. I just needed time!
As I started to lead Julie away to get cookies from our kitchen, we saw my no longer a kitten holding the lower half of a bunny body in her mouth. She dropped it right in front of my feet, full of love and pride, trophy style, in the tough as nails and I don’t give a shit way that only a cat knows how to be.
Julie screamed and ran home.
We had run out out of time.
Julie and I were never the same again, even though she was still nice to me, probably because her parents were so nice and she was so well raised.
My parents were nice too, as evidenced by the fact that they let me quit the swim team.
___________________
Now, you might think that is enough about bunnies (in fact, I bet you do), but there is one more story I need to tell, to round out my fucked up bunny trifecta.
___________________
There was a man.
And a mansion.
And a magazine with “really good articles.”
And they were turning really pretty women into bunnies.
Only pretty women, and only bunnies in the sense that they had to wear fake rabbit ears on their heads and cotton tails on their butts, stuck on over tiny bathing suits and nylons...Oh, and bow ties!
What.
Is.
Happening?
I had so many questions about these bunnies that I didn’t know where to begin, or who to ask. When I first found out about the bunnies (in the bathroom at my friend’s house, thanks to the startling magazine stash under the toilet with all of those good articles), I was sure I was onto something important. Something that would be all over the big news with Walter Cronkite, not just the little news with Bill Bonds, once I had reported it. And while I did feel bad about my my friend’s dad who had always been so nice to me but who would now obviously have to go to jail, I felt better when I remembered that her mom also had a fancy job in a business office. My friend’s family would be ok. (I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s life — I only wanted to make things right.)
But when I started doing my spy work, I realized that everyone already knew about these women bunnies. There was a whole world of them and that world was getting bigger every second. My dad told me about the mansion in Hollywood and my mom said that boys will be boys and that women were free to do whatever they wanted. They both told me that the women made a good living and got to travel a lot.
As I was trying to get my brain around all of this, I learned more about the man behind this bunny business. He was old but the bunnies were young. He was sort of handsome in a grandpa way but only ever wore silk robes and captain’s hats. His office was a spinning bed and he always smoked a pipe while working. I was looking for something to put him in jail for, but then I learned that his girlfriend, “Barbi," was the lady I loved from Hee Haw and the Love Boat. I had wanted to be her because she was so pretty (even with her brown hair) and because she had such a nice singing voice. They looked really happy in the pictures, and I never saw her in a bunny costume, although I did see her (almost) naked on the cover of the magazine the next time I had to pee at my friend’s house.
The bunnies looked happy. Movie stars went to the mansion. Jimmy Carter did an interview for the magazine. I had recently learned in school that sometimes you need a Revolution to make things right, even though I didn’t understand exactly (or at all) what this Bunny Revolution was about.
This would be the third strike for my relationship with bunnies, even though I could tell one more story about the time I grew up and my husband and I got a baby dwarf bunny named Pete for our daughters as a surprise, but then he died the next morning from diarrhea.
I will spare you that one, as I think it is pretty clear that I might have some more internal spy work to do on my own thoughts and feelings about bunnies.
At least I still like swimming and neighbors.
And cats…at any age.
(But never running and only the occasional cheeseburger….with a nice glass of bordeaux rouge or a cold beer in a bottle.)