the bunny in my backyard

My backyard is huge and fenced in and filled with plants and trees of all types. It is a Garden of Eden. On any morning when the temperature is above freezing and there is no snow on the ground, I can look out a back window of my house and see a collection of wild animals doing whatever it is that nature commands them to do. Usually there are squirrels and rabbits and birds of all sorts (robins, cardinals, blue jays, some hawks....these are the only birds that come to mind, but there are others there, too). On occasion there are chipmunks and skunks, and there probably are raccoons, foxes, and possums that have journeyed through the yard.

Inside the house is my old and overweight dog Chase, a Golden Retriever that at this stage of his life should more aptly be called Lay Down and Sleep. We also have three cats---Oliver, Mia, and Zoey---that are new to our home

Because of a lot of rainfall and some extenuating circumstance in the past two weeks, I haven't been able to cut the grass at my house. Now the grass directly beyond my patio is incredibly overgrown, much more so than the rest of the lawn on my property. I don't know why this happened. Maybe it's because this area received a double dose of fertilizer last year.

In any event, one of the rabbits that lives in my Garden of Eden interpreted the long grass to mean that it was safe to dig a hole there and give birth to a litter of bunnies. The bunnies are newly born, each one barely three inches long and not able to do much but suckle its mother and lay in the nest as it grows.

Now comes the part in this story where my big overweight dog Chase is involved. Yesterday before dusk, I let him out back to take a pee, and he ambled around the area where he usually does his business and discovered the rabbit's nest. The grass is long there, and the mother rabbit thought it was safe.

But it was not. My dog, being a dog, sniffed out the bunnies and thought, "Eureka! Food!" So he gobbled one up in his mouth, gave it a chomp or two but found it not to his liking, and then deposited it still alive right outside my sliding patio door. When I went to let Chase back inside the house, there was the baby rabbit, suffering in pain.

I looked at it from inside the house and thought, What is that? A bunny that Chase chewed up? I called my oldest daughter Faith over. She looked at it and said, "Its guts are hanging out." Upon closer inspection, I realized that she was right. The poor little baby bunny, barely a few inches long, had two puncture wounds on its body. One bite had severed its back and the other had ripped a gash near its butt, from where some innards were protruding.

My dog, being a dog, seemed oblivious to all this. He had done what dogs would naturally do, and now his only interest was in finding a spot inside the house to lay down and sleep.

The bunny, meanwhile, was suffering in silence. Its eyes were closed, but its limbs moved frantically trying to alleviate the pain. I initially had wondered if I should move it back to the nest, but decided that this was pointless.

As the event was unfolding, the thought had occurred to me, "Can the bunny be saved?" I knew that it probably couldn't, that the vet's office would be closed, and that even if I found a vet still open, would I want to pay to have a wild rabbit mended?

I wondered if I should drown the bunny to put it out of its misery, but realized that I couldn't make myself do that. I asked Faith if I should take a heavy decorative stone that we have out back and use it to crush the bunny's skull, and she squealed in horror, "No!" and I knew I certainly wouldn't be able to do that, either.

I ended up looking in the phonebook for a 24-hour vet's office. I asked if there was a way for me to put the bunny out of its misery. The vet, who was 30 minutes away by car, said that I could bring the bunny in and it would be euthanized. But as I was on the phone, I saw that the bunny had stopped moving. I told the vet that nature had taken its course and that the bunny had died.

The death was a relief for me. Hey, I am a meat eater and enjoy cow or pork or chicken or fish almost every day. If someone prepared a fine rabbit dish, I'd probably enjoy that, too. But I didn't want the bunny to suffer, which it was doing in a terrible way. Now that it was dead, I could honestly say that it lifted some of my guilt.

About 30 minutes passed before I decided that it was time for the bunny to be disposed of. In my recycling bin was a plastic container that had once held cookie dough. This would serve as the bunny's coffin.

So I went outside and used the container's lid to scoop the bunny inside the coffin. Surprisingly, I saw the bunny's upper limbs move slightly. So, it wasn't dead yet. But by this time, I knew that the bunny was beyond the grasp of life. I felt sorry for it, but knew that it would have to die in the warmth of its plastic coffin, which I put in the garbage can by the side of my garage.

Life would go on in my own personal Garden of Eden.

On a break

I have not been on vacation, just have been doing other things since my last post. I hope to get something new up here soon. For now, time to go bowling.....!

a joke

The greatest joke of all time:

A forlorn horse walks into a bar and orders a drink.

The bartender asks, "Why the long face?"

the book

When I started this blog site a few weeks ago, a friend asked me if it was for therapeutic reasons. I told him that it was, but I guess that is only a partial response. The rest of the truth is that I am not exactly sure why I started it. Deep down, I think I am hoping that Oprah or David Letterman or someone in power finds my site, that Hollywood comes knocking on my door asking me to write screenplays, and that agents and book publishers flood me with offers that I can't refuse.

When I was young, I honestly thought the day would come when I would write the Great American Novel. I carried that belief for decades, but truth is I never embarked on the journey because, as I frequently told people, I didn't know what to write about.

In my mind, the great books have to be outlined long before the pen hits the paper (or, in this era, the fingers hit the keyboard). The characters have to be fully developed, the reasons for their existence explained, the plot carefully crafted, and each chapter detailed so that the writer knows which direction he or she is heading when the writing actually begins.

I could never do all that, I told myself. So the dream of writing a book was put off for a later time. But then in the past decade or so, I took notice of a number of nonfiction books written about how to write a book. These books declared that you really didn't need an idea, or characters that were developed, or have an inkling of how the book would unfold as the chapters rolled by. The key, these book claimed, was that all of this would happen naturally.

Still, I have not progressed past the first few pages of writing a book. In November each year, there is an online contest in which countless participants take part in writing their books. There is no prize for writing one, just the personal satisfaction of completing the job. The contest urges people on by offering online support groups, and word-count devices, and forums where chapters of your book can be posted. I have started these writing journeys a few times in the past, but have not gotten beyond a few days, all because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be writing about. My dream has died during these Novembers, and I haven't even started the contest in the two most recent years because I know how it will end. I just don't have an idea for a book.

Perhaps I should study the classics more and try to emulate the techniques of the masters. There is Twain, Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Ayn Rand, Virginia Wolf, and so many more. The best way to begin is to copy what someone else has done to find success.

"It was a dark and stormy night...."

the bad guy

I watched a movie the other day from 1992 called "Bad Lieutenant" about a corrupt NYC cop, starring Harvey Keitel. As the movie opens, the viewer takes a liking to Harvey because he is such a tough and hard-nosed SOB of a cop, someone who would give real shit to the bad guys.

But then as the movie continues, the viewer sees Harvey as indeed "bad" as the title foretells, as he sinks into a morass of all that is lousy in the world: He's a crook, a drunk, a cheater on his wife, a gambler, and a big-time drug user.

In one scene, Harvey has just shot up some heroine, and after groping around with some female heroine friends, he stands naked in a corner. I don't know why this scene is in the movie. I suspect it's because Harvey wanted it to be. The movie would have been just fine without it in depicting Harvey as a horrible human being, i.e., his drug use, his gambling, his drinking, etc. But this scene....why? I think it's because he thought it elevated his stature as an actor, as if his Hollywood peers would be left thinking, "Hey, Harvey Keitel is standing naked in a movie. Wow, he must really love his art to do that!" and Harvey thinking, "Fuck you, this is what us great actors do for our craft!"

I'm not trying to take anything away from Harvey. As I calculated things, Harvey was in his early 50s when this movie was made, and believe me, he is in shape like a tough mother fucka. I don't know much about Harvey's career, but from that naked scene, it looks like he was some kind of serious athlete his whole life. Plus, there's the case of Harvey's dick being on display for the whole world to see as he just stands there during that scene. That steers back to my earlier statement about him elevating his stature. Harvey is by no means short on stuff down there, if you know what I mean, but at the same time he appears to me to be rather average. So it's got to be the whole "Hey, I'm Harvey Keitel, I'm a bad ass and hung like a porn star, so fuck you!" attitude that I think he has.

The movie as a whole is a good one, and I am sure that it received good reviews when it was released back in '92. But there had to be others like me who were irritated as hell by Harvey's action late in the film. What I am talking about is when Harvey's character reaches the stage when he is a dead man walking. At this point, when he gets really distressed, he cringes his face and emits an irritating "E-e-e-e-e-e-e...." sound that just grates on the nerves. It lasts for minutes it seems, and I am just glad that I had the movie TiVoed so I could fast forward past these scenes.

In any event, if you haven't seen the movie, it's worth your hour and a half. Just be prepared for some naked Harvey and some irritating Harvey. And I hope that if he ever reads this, he doesn't come beat me up, naked.

my mom

My mom is old and in the process of dying. Tomorrow, Thursday, I am scheduled to fly to Albuquerque to attend a "black-tie optional" function at night for the grand opening the next day of a new nuclear technology museum. On Friday, after touring the museum for a few hours, I'll fly back home.

I hope my mom will be all right while I'm gone. Today I received a phone call from her caregiver, who was frantic because the previous night had been tough on my mom. The caregiver is Polish, and I don't speak much Polish. All I know is that it was a tough night, which means my mom was struggling for breath and was in pain. My mom has what is called end-stage heart disease, so however long she's got on this earth, it's guaranteed that she's not going to get better, like someone with pneumonia might recover.

About five years ago I had to go to New Orleans for work. Upon my return to Chicago, as soon as my plane touched down at the airport, I turned on my cell phone and learned that my mom had suffered a heart attack and stroke. She has been living on borrowed time ever since. I think that, at least according to how the doctor spoke to my brothers and me five years ago, she was supposed to be dead back then. That she has survived this long is some sort of miracle.

She has had incidents over the past five years---gasping for breath, lungs filling with fluid---where we thought she was a goner. But she has always bounced back. I am hoping that she does the same thing this time, yet I know she is living on borrowed time. I am just hoping that nothing happens while I am gone in Albuquerque. I would hate to lose my mom while I was away. When her time comes, I hope I have time to say a final good bye. She is my mom, and I will miss her, and I love her. It's a tough part of life, this part about dying.