One Little Rabbit Jumping on the Bed

~a guest post by Daddy Bunny

One of the great things about being a rabbit is that even though I turned 18 a few years ago, I still get to live with my mom.  I stay home all day munching the everlasting carrot Uncle Nathy-Boo gave me for Christmas, playing with my brothers and sisters and hiding in Mom’s bed.  On really adventurous days, I even hop down the hall to visit Malaria and Giraffe in the living room.  But the best adventures are when my mom takes me on trips with her.

We’ve been all sorts of places together.  This month, we went to San Diego.  Last month, we went to Las Vegas and Monterey.  The month before that, I got to ride on a train in my own little cheese-shaped seat and my mom took me to my first Packer game.  We went to Uganda, and Amsterdam, and Iowa, and Portland, and Washington, D.C.  We even went to Lake Tahoe.  And that’s all this year!

My absolute favorite trips are the ones where I get to see my aunts, my cousins and Grandma and Grandpa.  That happened a lot this year. We went to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Wisconsin four times.

I love Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  Gibby and Foo Foo are always there to play with me.  We play hide and seek a lot with my mom and my Aunty Munchkinhead.  Sometimes, Aunty Alfred is there and she brings my cousin Timmy Bear along.  Then they get to play hide and seek, too.  If we’re really good little rabbits and gibbons and bears, we get to play board games with our moms and Grandma.

And when nobody’s watching, we go exploring in Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  Even though I grew up there, and Gibby and Foo Foo still live there, the place is so big, there’s always lots to explore.  There’s a fabulous slide in the hallway, behind a little square door.  It’s so much fun!  We climb up the bookcase to the door, sit down on the ledge, slide down the ramp screaming “weeeeee!” and then there’s this huge drop of and we plop right into a pile of fluffy clothes.

Gibby loves to hang out in the bathroom. With the poles holding up the shower curtain and the long neck on the part where the shower water comes out, there’s lots of things for him to hang on and stretch his long arms.  Foo Foo and I hop along the hallway floor and peek through the railings above the stairs.  It’s a nice little place to watch the activity below.

And when I really want a lot of fun, a lot, a lot of fun, I scamper off to Grandma and Grandpa’s room.  They have this giant bed with pretty, soft blankets on it.  It’s the perfect place for a bunny like me to work on my hopping skills.  Sometimes I hop so high, I can even pretend I’m a bird!

My mom says we’re going back to Grandma and Grandpa’s in a few weeks.  I can’t wait!

Moral Dilemmas

“You see the moral dilemmas we have to face….” There are those moments, hopefully in all of our lives, when the world stops suddenly and for a moment you are acutely aware of just how small our bubbles are.  Sometimes it’s your own bubble, when you briefly encounter something that had previously only existed on the other side of your thin protective soap skin.  Sometimes it’s someone else’s bubble, as you see them looking out through their glistening, rainbowed film.  This time, it was the later.

She was talking about palmetto bugs, American cockroaches that aren’t afraid of the light; rather large compared to bitty Nashville cockroaches, but not very big compared to what lived in my host mother’s latrine in Zambia.  Apparently, every home in Georgia has them. They’re part of life there, and so is dealing with them.

And that was her moral dilemma.  “You see the moral dilemmas we have to face in Georgia,” she said as though it was so obviously exactly what she was dealing with.  “Do we serve guests dishes that these bugs have crawled over, or do we live in a house with poison in it.” Buggy dishes, or bug poison; to have live bugs or to have dead bugs.

For her, this may truly have been a moral dilemma. Despite her having lived in Georgia for several years now, her bubble world is still very California.  Natural this, organic that, boo large corporations, yay free range farms, etc.  But I couldn’t see this from my bubble.  All I could see was her pressed up against the very edge of her bubble, a wavy line of soap drifting across her face, and between us a gulf filled with all my thoughts.

“The moral dilemmas we have to face…”  I thought of my friends living in Jos who have to decided whether or not to go to church on Sunday mornings for fear they might be blown up by Boko Haram extremists.  I thought of the Sudanese man I knew at the refugee center in Nashville who described his life before coming to the US as very similar to What is the What and would say no more about it.  I thought of my many colleagues and friends in Uganda where the government and society are daily struggling with if and how to integrate former child soldiers of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army back into mainstream society.  I thought of the jury panel on the death penalty trial last week in Martinez.  I thought of our soldiers, and our doctors and our leaders.  And, I just couldn’t see poisoning cockroaches as a moral dilemma.

We should all wish for such to be our moral dilemma.

I was There

There’s those special days in our lives, the one’s we’ll never forget, the one’s when we see history being made and we know it.  The Moon Landing, the Berlin Wall coming down, the election that took months to count.  And we can say, “I was there.”

I was there; I saw history being made; I was there for the call that ended the lockout.

One of my twitter friends, a Seahawks fan, graciously invited a couple of his Packer-fan friends up for the game.  I traded in a pile of my Amtrak rewards points for a roundtrip ticket and bordered the train.  A short ride up, only a day, Daddy Bunny and I watched the beautiful Northwestern coast role past as I headed to one of the most exciting days ever, my first Packer game.

I met up with my friend for a tailgate in a parking lot near the stadium.  A wonderful mix of Packers and Seahawks fans milled around the area.  Brats and burgers were grilling; footballs were flying through the air; and one crazy group of people was playing beer pong.  My favorite part was the State Farm commercial impressions, “Roggg-ers!”  Everyone was so nice, some Vikings fans even came over to chat.

The stadium was packed and packed with Packers fans as well as Seahawks fans.  I estimated about a quarter of the stadium was Packers fans; others estimated about a third.  Mind you, Seattle is 1,933 miles away from Green Bay.   There were Packers fans behind me and Packer fans down to my right.  Everyone else in my group was a Seahawks fan, but that only made the game that much more fun.

All of us on the edge of our seats, back and forth, up, down, another sack.  Another ridiculous call, another amazing play.  Football, football at it’s finest; reffing at it’s worst.

When the game ended, I mean actually ended, after the players came back out of the locker rooms to pretend to kick the extra point that the refs had just not bothered about until they realized they had to bother about it – when the game ended, the sympathy came pouring in.  Texts from angry family members on the other side of the country.  Texts from friends in Cali telling me it was ok to be mad.  Tweets from everywhere offering condolences and decrying the horrible call.  And most of all, apologies from Seahawks fans who sincerely meant it when they said it was a bad call, but couldn’t hide their own joy at winning.  Permission to be mad?  How could I be mad?  I was surrounded by incredibly happy people, and incredibly happy people who weren’t gloating, who were gracious winners, who accepted the win for the sketchiness that it was.

It was a most amazing game to be at.  What a great first Packer game!  Thank you, MtySeahawk

Now, I just wonder how many people’s Facebook pages I’m on. People really wanted a photo with a real, live cheesehead.