A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Smoosh

Last night, there was a group of kids hanging out in the street in front of our house. They were loud, awkward and loopy like most 12 to 14 year-olds usually are.

As Deb and I buttoned up the downstairs and headed upstairs to bed I stopped. I stood in the dark and watched the group of kids shuffle around on their skateboards being loud, awkward and loopy. Then I noticed one of the reasons they were being so loud.

A bunny was running around in circles in the middle of the road. I watched the bunny as it careened off the ankles of the kids hanging out around my house (and now I know if there actually was a Trix Rabbit the children wouldn’t try to get their cereal back, they’d just shriek and run away only to come back every now and again to try to poke the rabbit with a stick).

I lost interest in the kids pretty quickly after that. You see, the rabbit wasn’t an adult. It was small. In fact, it might be about the same size as the rabbits born in my backyard a few weeks ago.

Oh no.

It was the bunny I planted in the ground with my sneaker last June.

It had to be.

You may remember back on June 28th. . . Okay, you probably don’t remember but I wrote about how I accidentally stuffed a baby bunny’s head into the turf. I described how its little legs floundered around in the air before I finally got around to plucking it out of the soil. It was bleeding from the nose. I didn’t think it was going to make it. But I put it back into its nest and was relieved to discover it some how survived.

It survived with BRAIN DAMAGE!

There’s a developmentally disabled rabbit wandering our neighborhood and it’s my fault. I thought about making it a little hockey helmet it could wear to protect its already damaged noggin’. After all, the rabbit wouldn’t be difficult to catch because all it does is run in circles. But that didn’t seem appropriate.

This morning as I pulled out of the driveway I half expected to see Ricky (that’s what I named the rabbit) still tearing around the street making furious loops that went no where fast.

He wasn’t there.

But I did pass a tiny, short yellow bus, the size of a breadbox, as I pulled out of the neighborhood.