Vi Chronicles: I Found This Bunny For You

Vi lived in the moment, and in all those moments she lived, her goal was to have a good time as often as possible.  On Fridays, this generally involved an evening at the local Amvets, feeding quarters into the slot machines and sipping sombreros made of Allen's Coffee Brandy and milk.  When the bar closed, whichever family member had delivered her to the Amvets would drive Vi home.  On the way, she would keep her eyes peeled for stray animals.  If she found one she would bring it home and give it to me.

Thankfully, after an oil burner tank's worth of Allen's Coffee Brandy and milk, it wasn't all that easy to spot stray animals on the side of the road in the middle of the night.  Still, twice, she succeeded.

The first time, she gave me a baby bunny.  It was adorable.  I must have been around 8-years-old. When I recount my childhood, age is often determined by which house my mother lived in at the time.  This house was not the one by the lake.  It was the ranch, surrounded by woods, on a lonely stretch of road.  They must not have lived there long because I couldn't drive you there if I wanted to, but it is the house where a lot of my Vi memories took place.  Maybe it was a particularly good year for remembering things, or maybe it's just that a lot of memorable things happened there.  I don't remember.  At any rate, a bunny was a delightful gift to receive in the wee hours of the morning.  Vi didn't believe in waiting 'til the sun came up.  Surprises were best delivered, warm and cuddly, with much hilarity, in the middle of the night.

The bunny slept in a box next to my bed for the rest of that night.  The next day, my Step Dad, Tony, built a hutch  in the backyard where the bunny lived happily ever after, until the great bunny massacre, which happened a couple days later.  I wasn't there at the time-I only lived with my mom on weekends-but when I came back the next weekend the bunny was history.  My family didn't sugar coat things.  There was no farm with other baby bunnies in an idyllic bunny environment, nothing like that, just the stark reality of the situation, which was that some fucking raccoon ate my rabbit.

The second time Vi found a wild animal after a night at the bars and brought it home at 2 am, I was 20.  The house was in Portland and my college roommate, Jeannie, and I were living with Vi and Tony for the summer, spending our days at the beach, hitting the clubs at night, and waiting impatiently on Sunday mornings for Tony's mom to deliver her regular spaghetti and meatballs special.  It had been a splendid summer and a wild animal arriving at two a.m. only made it better.  This time, the animal was a baby skunk whose mother had been run over.

I know it doesn't seem like a good gift, but baby skunks are adorable.  They haven't developed their sprayers yet, so they are a lot like kittens.  We kept our skunk in the bathtub and named him Pepe.

It wasn't long before we realized that we were not well equipped for skunk care. We set about finding a new home for Pepe, and when I say "we", I mean Jeannie and me, as Vi had already forgotten we had a pet skunk.  Eventually, we found a nice farm in the country that adopted wildlife found on the roadside and we sent Pepe there to play in green pastures with other orphaned animals.

At least that's the story I tell myself.

Chicken out

See?  Like a cute little kitten

A Tail

He'd had the tail for years.  If you think it's easy to hide a tail that size, you are mistaken.  One does not simply fold a tail flat and tuck it in one's pants like a shirt tail.  It couldn't be looped, like a lasso, for the tendons, cartilage and scar tissue were stubborn with age.  He finally took to wearing a longish coat and, in summer, loose Hawaiian shirts and baggy pants.  During the winter he felt relatively free. People keep to themselves in the winter, don't they?  They scurry out as needed, carry out the least required, and scurry back home again to their nests and warm fires.  In winter, he didn't worry about the tail being spotted. Summers were different. People become more curious when the weather is warm. They sit on benches in the park, gather on porches, or stroll on the sidewalk, enjoying the sun, watching each other, and waiting for something interesting to happen; something like, perhaps, the sudden appearance of a tail-wielding man  

Tails make sleep difficult, as well.   It's hard to find a comfortable position. The best way was face down, of course, but he wasn't a natural stomach sleeper.  Occasionally, he thought back to the days before his tail had grown in; days when he slept eight or nine glorious hours at a time. He had awoken feeling fully rested, clear-headed and ready to tackle the world with all the vigor of the youthful and tail-less.  Now, most days, he operated within a buzzing, foggy bubble. Some days it sapped his energy just to dress and feed himself.  

I know what you are thinking.  You are thinking what anyone normal would think when considering the misery a tail that size must  cause its host.  Why keep it?  Why not dispatch that tail tout de suite?  Isn't that what you would do?  Find yourself a good doctor, a highly recommended tail specialist, and say to him, "Doc, this tail has to go!"?  But the man wasn't really normal like you, was he?  And he was afraid.

He thought about getting rid of the tail, of course he did.  He thought about it all the time.  When he awoke in the middle of the night, for the third or fourth time, and shifted his weight once again, to counter the weight of the tail, he often vowed that, come morning, he would call the doctor first thing.  Then morning would come and he would somehow forget.  The day would draw on and, at some point, he would remember, but he still wouldn't make the call.  There were too many unknowns.  

For one thing, it had become a part of him, like an arm or a leg.  Who in their right mind cuts off their arm? And what if the tail was meant to be?  God, in all his wisdom, surely would not have given him a tail without a reason.  Wouldn't it be wrong to remove a tail when he hadn't yet discovered its true purpose?  And, finally, as perverse as it might sound, the tail was his only friend.  Yes, it's true, he thought of the tail as a comrade. His fear of discovery had alienated him from any close friendships.  His tail was all he had.  Once it was gone who would he talk to?

Maybe he could grow a new tail-probably, he could-but going through the trouble to rid himself of the current tail, physically and emotionally, only to grow a new one...well, that was just insane. No, if he was going to cut off his tail, he would be done with it once and for all.  It was a deliberate and thoughtful process.  Excising a tail was not an endeavor one undertook as nonchalantly as cutting one's fingernails.  

He wasn't sure yet.

Chicken out

Butter Files: Uncle Don

We were returning home from a family trip, seven of us packed like sardines into the Chrysler station wagon.  As our home came into view, my Stepmom was the first to make the connection.

"Oh no!", she groaned.

"What?" we all thought, looking at each other.  Did we forget something?  Did we hit a cat?  Did this have anything to do with us at all?

And then we, too, looked towards our house and we also saw it:  The mile long Winnebago parked  in the middle of our lawn.

"Uncle Don!" we all yelled.  We kids adored Uncle Don.  For one thing, he drove around IN his house, like an eccentric, geriatric hermit crab on permanent vacation.  The freedom of the open road was Uncle Don's.  He went where he liked, he slept where he liked.  I still was having a little trouble working out the mathematics of how a vehicle that big could turn corners but I hoped that one day I could learn to do it and join Uncle Don in his adventurous lifestyle.  The budding opportunist in me recognized that Uncle Don was approaching the age where license renewals were not a given.  At some point the man was going to need a driver.  And a nurse, probably, but that wasn't my problem.  I wasn't very nurse-like.  I did suspect, however, that I would be a very good driver.

What also occurred to me, though, as we pulled into the driveway, was that my gentle, sweet Stepmom who was nice to everybody, didn't seem happy at the prospect of a visit from Uncle Don.  Why?  Wasn't he her uncle, after all?  Didn't he always show up unexpectedly, creating a sense of excitement and possibility?  Didn't he take all of his meals with us, being careful to make us aware of his restrictions so that we didn't accidentally send him into diabetic shock?  Didn't he open his Winnebago  doors to us kids to explore and climb over and didn't we all get the opportunity to sit in the driver's seat, before he suggested we all go back into the house and have a nice long visit and maybe a snack as he was feeling a bit peckish?  And didn't he always, always tell great stories while we waited for his laundry to finish washing?  Sure, they were the same stories he'd told on his last visit and the one before that, but they were mostly good stories, if a bit long winded.  I didn't understand her visceral reaction to his unexpected presence.

Uncle Don had come calling.  How could this be bad news?  Who could understand the mysterious ways of grown ups?  Not me.  I shrugged my skinny shoulders, hopped out of the wagon and raced  across the lawn, calling first turn at the wheel.